


Victoria's Daughter (Part 1)

by DesireeArmfeldt



Series: Victoria's Daughter [1]
Category: due South
Genre: Children, Friendship, Ghosts, Kid Fic, POV Female Character, POV Multiple, POV Third Person Limited, Parents & Children, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-30
Updated: 2012-09-30
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:45:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesireeArmfeldt/pseuds/DesireeArmfeldt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A decade post-canon, Ray Kowalski has taken over Lieutenant Welsh's job at the 27th district, and Fraser has been killed in the line of duty some years earlier.  When a runaway girl shows up at the police station looking for answers about Fraser's past, both she and Ray are forced to confront literal and metaphorical ghosts, wrestle with unpleasant truths, and figure out where to place their trust.</p><p>This is PART 1 of a 2-part story (in the way that Victoria's Secret was a 2-part episode).  It ends on a cliffhanger.  There will be a Part 2 eventually (I promise!), but given how long it took to write this much, it's unlikely to be soon.  Profound apologies.</p><p>(I don't usually post WIPs....This is your chance to tell me what you're hoping for/expecting to see dealt with in Part 2. :) )</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to:  
> * sageness & ButterflyGhost for helping me think through ideas when I was stuck early on;  
> * kuonji for looking at my half-assed barely-readable outline and ditto;  
> * mergatrude for beta-reading a draft with gaping holes in it, and for providing useful links;  
> * Sock_Marionette for second beta and looking up random information;  
> * Big Bang mods hazelwho and mizface for encouragement at key moments and also running this thing (without which this story might have languished at 8K-and-stuck forever);  
> * everyone on chat & LJ who offered ideas, advice and cheerleading. 
> 
> It takes a village.
> 
> Also, thanks to look_turtles for [companion art](http://archiveofourown.org/works/533497) \-- check it out!

It was one of those days that made Lieutenant Ray Kowalski wonder why he’d ever taken the damn job.  Lots of paperwork, phone calls with aggravating lawyers and demanding higher-ups, a fiasco of a press conference, and in general way too much slogging through bullshit and way too little excitement.  He thought he did a pretty decent job of running the division, all in all, but days like this underlined the point that he really wasn’t a desk-job kind of guy, he was an emergency-action kind of guy with bad eyes and a bum knee, and that point didn’t really need underlining, _thank you fucking kindly._   Days like this made him miss the Fraser times more than usual, made him downright nostalgic for a nice fifty-foot jump into the festering, ice-cold Lake That We Still Call Michigan.

So, what with the reporters and the thinking about Fraser and the knee giving him grief because the humidity was bouncing up and down like a fucking yo-yo, plus the general Thursday-ness, Ray was in a mood to bite some heads off.  Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, his detectives knew him well enough to keep their heads down and not give him an excuse to jump down their throats.  Even the new civilian aide, what-was-her-name, the really cute one who was young enough to be Ray’s daughter, put a lid on her usual cheekiness when she stuck her head into his office.

“Sir?  There’s been someone calling asking for Detective Vecchio.  I told her there’s no Detective Vecchio working here, but she keeps calling back, asking what happened to him, can I put her in touch?  And I wouldn’t just do that even if I knew the guy, but I just thought, maybe I should let you know.  She seemed like it was important to her, and I thought maybe something funny was going on.  Is there even any such person?”

“Yeah,” Ray told her, keeping a carefully straight face.  “There was a Detective Vecchio, used to work here in the nineties.  Left the force and moved to Florida, years ago.  Probably nothing to worry about, but she calls back, or you get anyone else poking around, you let me know.”

“Sure thing.”

“Hey, Jenny.”— _That’s her name, right; God, I’m going senile_ —“Good instinct, there.  You keep telling me if you think something smells fishy.  Don’t matter if it’s something dumb.”

The kid’s face lit up.  “Yes, sir.  Thanks!”

Ray went back to not working on the stack of paperwork in front of him.  After several minutes of pen-chewing, he dug out his cell phone and dialed Florida.

“Memory Lanes, how can I help you?”

“Get me Vecchio.  Please.  Tell him it’s his friend Ray, from Chicago.”

A pause, then Vecchio’s annoying drawl, more South mixed in with the Chicago than the last time Ray heard it, which wasn’t all that recently, because why the hell would he want to talk to Vecchio under normal circumstances?

“Kowalski?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What the hell are you calling for?  Nothing’s wrong with Frannie, is it?  Or the kids?”

“Nah, nah, nothing like that.  They were all fine, last I heard, which, before you ask, was last Sunday.  Look, someone’s been calling the station asking for you, which I can’t remember the last time that happened, and it sounds like they want you kinda bad.  Now, I can put ‘em in touch with you, or I can tell ‘em to get lost, but I figure it’s your call and either way I’d like to know what it’s about, you know?”

“No idea, sorry,” said Vecchio.  “Could be something dumb, could be someone from high school crawled out from under a rock and hasn’t heard of Facebook, not that I use the damn thing.  I don’t know.  But. . .”

“Yeah.”  Ray sighed.  “But.”

“Maybe you’d better not give ‘em my number until you get some idea what’s going on, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.  If it turns out to be something, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” said Vecchio, sounding like he meant it.  “Hey, you want me to give Stella a message or anything?”

“Sure, give her my love.  And tell her anytime she gets tired of mosquitoes and your sorry ass, she’s welcome to come crash on my. . .couch.” 

“Fuck you, too,” said Vecchio, but it was mostly a friendly _fuck you._

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

There were no more calls for Vecchio, and Ray had pretty much forgotten about the whole thing by the next afternoon when Jenny popped into his office.

“There’s some kid from one of the local schools on the phone,” she said.  “Says she’s doing some kind of local history project for her social studies class, and could she come in and interview you sometime in the next week?”

“Interview me about what?” he asked.

“She said something about the history of the neighborhood and local heroes.  She mentioned that thing with the big hostage situation at the elementary school—I remember that from when I was a kid, our teachers took time out of class to talk with us about it and stuff.  I didn’t know you were involved in that.”

“Yeah,” said Ray, suddenly feeling old.  _It wasn’t even that long ago.  2001.  ‘When I was a kid,’ Jesus._

He remembered crawling through the steam tunnels literally on Fraser’s heels, the two of them crashing down out of the ceiling, Fraser talking the head nutjob into tears, and then the frantic chasing around after the damn bombs.

“Anyway,” Jenny went on.  “I guess she’d looked up some old newspaper articles and they gave the names of some of the officers involved, so she was asking if any of them were still around.  She was really excited when I told her you still worked here, and said she’d especially like to talk to you and hear about your _unique perspective_.”

Ray wasn’t fond of either school or bullshit, but he had a soft spot for kids, and he had to admit it was flattering that someone thought he might have anything interesting to say about anything. 

“Sure, what the hell.  Tell her she can come in Monday after school.“  Something was niggling at him, but Jenny was out the door before he could put his finger on it, and then his desk phone rang.

“Kowalski.”

“Lieutenant Kowalski,” said a woman’s voice.  ( _Canadian,_ Ray thought, and then,  _Why do I think that?  Oh, yeah, ‘cause she sounds American but she pronounced it “leftenant.”_ )  “This is Meg Thatcher speaking.  Perhaps you remember me?”

“Uh, sorry, you’ll have to—wait, Jesus, you’re the Ice—the Inspector, Inspector Thatcher.  From the Canadian Consulate.”  _And what the hell is this?_ he thought.  _The Vecchio Years: Reunion Tour?_

“Indeed,” said Thatcher, with that brusque we-are-not-amused voice that apparently Ray had not forgotten at all, even though the last time he heard it was close to ten years ago.

“Well, hey, Inspector, what’s shaking?  Uh, sorry, I’m sure you have some other rank these days--”

“Yes, but that’s not important.  What is important is that it has come to my attention that someone has recently been digging up information about Constable Benton Fraser.  While this would not normally be any great cause for concern, the methods employed have been somewhat unorthodox, as has the particular information this person seems to be after.  He or she would seem to be particularly interested in the Constable’s time in Chicago, and his association with Detective Vecchio.”

Ray’s adrenaline was pumping now.  _This ain’t no fucking coincidence.  Two people suddenly asking around about Vecchio, nuh-uh.  Not to mention there’s no such thing as coincidence when Fraser’s involved.  Never was._

“Any idea who this is who’s looking?” he asked.

“Unfortunately, the person has been. . .strangely adept at eluding discovery, although less so at covering his or her tracks.”

“Let me guess.  You think they’re heading for Chicago.”

“I think that’s highly likely.”

“Okay.  Thanks for the heads-up.  I’ll be on the lookout.”

“Lieutenant Kowalski?”  Thatcher hesitated, which was unusual for the Ice Queen Ray remembered.

“Yeah?”

“Pardon me for this question, but I have to ask.  Are you absolutely sure that Constable Fraser. . .that is. . .”

Ray’s voice sounded tired and old in his own ears, reminded him of Lieutenant Welsh’s the last year before he retired, but the pain was old enough that the sharp edges had mostly worn away.  “I was standing right next to him.  I saw him take three bullets.  Saw him flatline at the hospital.  Made ‘em wait a solid thirty-six hours before I’d let them declare him dead, ‘cause I’d seen the kind of shit he could pull.  Three more days in the funeral parlor, and I sat by him every fucking minute, and then I watched them burn the body.  Fraser’s dead, for real, no mistake, no backsies.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then Thatcher said, “Thank you,” and if this hadn’t been the Ice Queen, Ray would have sworn she was crying.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So am I,” she said, but her voice was already sounding more like her usual brisk self.  “You watch your back, _Leftenant_ , eh?”

“Will do, ma’am.”

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

“Jenny.  That kid with the history project.  She say who she meant by _local heroes?_ ” Ray asked.

“No, sir.  I mean, she mentioned the hostage thing, and obviously she wants to talk to a police officer, but. . .”

“She didn’t mention Detective Vecchio, did she?”

“No, I would have told you about that.”

“Or Constable Benton Fraser?”  It felt funny to say the name after so long.  When was the last time he’d talked about Fraser, or even mentioned him to someone?

Jenny shook her head.  “Who’s this Fraser guy?  Should I be keeping an ear out for people asking about him, too?”

“Yeah.  This kid give her name?”

Jenny checked her message pad.  “Madeline Brennan.  From St. Ignatius.”

“Do me a favor.  Call them and see if they’ve got any such student.”

“You got it!”

Ray strode through the bullpen, taking note of the chaos level as he passed—three juvies trading insults while waiting to be booked, a pair of pissy-looking nuns, a headcase with a sandwich board raving about the end of the world to a pre-teen girl with a battered backpack, a guy in a tuxedo cursing out Detective Martinez—and concluded that the station could limp along without him for a while.  Which was good, because he had a serious need to walk off some jitters.  He thought better on his feet anyway.

The air outside was damp but not too cold, the last shreds of winter starting to give way to the promise of spring, though of course there was always the possibility that the weather would change its mind and dump a foot of snow on the city for an early April Fools’ Day present.  As he navigated the familiar streets on autopilot, Ray considered who might be motivated to hunt down Ray Vecchio for nefarious purposes after the man had been retired for nearly a decade. 

 _First of all, anyone I put away or otherwise pissed off while I was playing Vecchio.  All the people Vecchio put away or pissed off before I came along.  And hell, anyone Vecchio pissed off when he was undercover as the Bookman.  The FBI.  The Mob_. _This list is way too damn long._  

He didn’t realize he was walking to somewhere in specific until he found himself standing in front of the Canadian Consulate and realized A) he did need to talk to these guys, B) he wanted to do it himself rather than have Jenny or someone make a call, and C) he still missed Fraser like a missing hand: you get used to it, learn how to work without it, maybe you don’t think about it all the time, but that absence is always _there._   He stood out front of the Consulate for long enough to smoke a cigarette, staring at the blond beanpole of a Mountie on sentry duty until his gut was absolutely convinced that the only thing in that building was a bunch of strangers who barely knew or cared who the hell he was.  Then he strode through those big wooden doors and bulled his way past the politeness of the female Mountie on duty at the desk, who finally caved and let him talk to the boss.

The boss was polite but skeptical.  No, he wasn’t aware of any recent inquiries about Constable Fraser.  Yes, he had heard of Constable Fraser, the Consulate records referred to him, and there were certain stories that were well-known within the RCMP, but the man had been dead for years.  What harm did _Leftenant_ Kowalski think might come of inquiries about a long-dead Mountie?  No, he was not familiar with the details of the story of Holloway Muldoon.  Yes, he would have someone notify the _Leftenant_ of any inquiries about Constable Fraser, but really, this seemed like an awfully tenuous suspicion of—what was it he suspected, exactly?

“If I knew that, I’d know. . .something,” Ray muttered to himself as he limped back down the steps of the Consulate.  The trek over—longer than he remembered, or maybe it was just that he always used to drive it—hadn’t done his knee any favors.  He caught a cab back to the station, figuring he’d expense it.  _I’m investigating, damn it, I just don’t know what the hell I’m investigating yet._   And that right there was the story of his years as Detective Vecchio.  His years with Fraser.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

Back at the station, he prowled around making people nervous and waiting for either a hunch to strike or some new piece of evidence to drop in his lap.  Coming out of the john on the third floor, he nearly tripped over a dark-haired pre-teen girl.

“What the heck are you doing wandering around in here?” he snapped at her.

She looked up at him with big, blue, puppy-dog eyes— _Christ, kid ought to be doing commercials, or maybe locked up as a deadly weapon_ —and said, “I was just using the bathroom, someone said to come up here.  I’ve lost my parents, I’m waiting for them to come find me.  I’m sorry, I’ll go back downstairs now.”

He followed her back downstairs, grabbed Jenny, who was juggling two telephone calls at once, and asked what the story was with the girl’s parents.

“We haven’t been able to find them,” said Jenny.  “She said they’re tourists, in town for the weekend, but she doesn’t remember the name of the hotel.”

Ray flicked a sideways glance at the kid.  Clothes decent but not new.  L.L. Bean catalogue type: jeans, hiking boots, flannel shirt, parka.  ( _Way too warm for the weather, I just walked halfway across town in a windbreaker.  So yeah, not from town, came from somewhere much colder, or she’s headed there, or she’s from somewhere warm where they think it’s 30 below up here all the time. . ._ )  Neat, face clean, but jeans stained and hair not washed in the last couple of days.  Overstuffed backpack.  Big innocent eyes—too innocent, too attentive to him.  _Tourist, right.  More like runaway._  

“Well, hey,” he told Jenny.  “If you can’t get hold of them by dinner time, I’ll take her over to Frannie’s to have dinner, spend the night if necessary.  We can contact DCFS in the morning if things still aren’t sorted out.” 

Ray had a lot of respect for the people from the Department of Child and Family Services, but their red tape was a pain in the ass and for kids who were simply lost or even accidentally-on-purpose lost, it was faster and easier for everyone if the police could get the kid back to the family without having to bring child services in. 

“Anyway, you keep trying,” he told Jenny.  “Parents must be freaking out by now.  They don’t have cell phones?” he asked the kid.

“They don’t get service here,” she replied.

Ray was halfway to his office when he remembered that U.S. cellphone plans often didn’t work in Canada and vice versa.  He headed back to Jenny’s desk, and was not really surprised that in the two minutes his back had been turned, the kid had disappeared.  He turned the station upside down, but no big-eyed Canadian runaway.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

He hauled his ass out of the station around seven o’clock and drove to his favorite pizza place, where he sat staring at his half-eaten meal and wishing he had a partner to bounce ideas off of, or to argue about stupid stuff so that he could stop thinking in circles.  He tried to think of what Fraser would say if he were there (never mind that if he _were_ there, the problem would be completely different).  But all he could imagine were bunch of stupid Fraser-isms like _thank you kindly_ and _understood_ , and _I first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of my father_.  He’d never been able to anticipate what crazy shit was going to come out of Fraser’s mouth.  That was part of what he loved about the guy, and also why he wanted to kick him in the head on a regular basis.  The only thing all the thinking did was make him depressed on top of frustrated and jittery.

He gave up on the pizza; figured he’d head home and watch something brain-rotting on TV, see if sleeping on the problem would help any.  But when he pulled out of his parking spot, he found himself whipping a U-turn and cruising back towards the station instead.

The 2-7 was pretty quiet for a Friday evening, although it was still early; eleven or midnight and the joint would probably be jumping with drunks and violent offenders like usual.  Ray assigned a detail to go keep an eye on Frannie Vecchio’s place on the off chance someone was thinking of making trouble over there.  ( _Six little kids and no one in the house with the sense of self-preservation God gave lettuce._ )  He prowled around the building for a while, not knowing what he was looking for and not finding anything unusual.  Then he opened the door to his darkened office and froze, reaching for his gun.

_Someone’s in here._

“Freeze,” he said in a conversational tone.  “I can see you, so you’d better get your hands on your head right this fucking second.”

He couldn’t see a damn thing, of course, and he couldn’t hear any movement, either, just someone breathing.  Hoping whoever it was wasn’t stupid enough to try to jump an armed cop in the middle of a police station—or shoot—he sidled in the door and snaked his left hand along the wall until he found the light switch.

For a second, he thought he was going crazy, because the room was empty.  He took a breath and forced himself to scan the room again, more slowly this time.  His desk chair was out of position, pushed off to one side.  And yeah, behind the desk, there was something back there.

He took a couple of steps forward, until he could see past the top of the desk.  A dark, curly head with a pair of hands folded on top of it.  A couple more steps and he was looking down at the cute little runaway kid.  She was kneeling in front of his desk, surrounded by loose papers.  The desk drawers were open; so was the bottom drawer of the file cabinet behind her.

 _Kid’s got fucking balls_ , he thought, shaking his head.  _Who breaks into a police station?_

“Come on out of there,” he said, reaching back to pull the door shut.  He gestured for her to sit down in his desk chair, which she did.

“Now, look, I caught you fair and square.  You gonna be a pain in the neck and make me chase you?  ‘Cause I can do that, but it’s gonna make me cranky.  Or I can put the gun away and sit down over here and you can be a good kid and stay put and we can have a nice friendly talk.  Which is it gonna be?”

She turned the puppy-dog eyes on him again ( _God, she’s going to be a heartbreaker in a couple of years)_ , but he shook his head with a tight little smile to let her know that he was on to her tricks, he wasn’t a guy could be made a fool of by a pretty face, no way.  She seemed to get the message, because she sighed and folded her hands in her lap.

“I won’t run away.  I promise,” she said earnestly, and her earnest could give Benton Fraser a run for his money, which was saying something.

“Okay.”  He holstered the gun and pulled up a second chair for himself, blocking her in behind the desk.  “So.  Spill.  Who are you, and why are you breaking into my desk?”

The kid licked her lips, glanced over Ray’s left shoulder, and then looked him in the eyes.

“My name is Fiona,” she said.  “I’m on a quest.”

 _You mention the Hand of Franklin, kid, and I’ll kick you in the head._  

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Ray said.  “What’s at the end of this quest?”

“The truth about Constable Benton Fraser.”

Ray stared at her, trying to keep his jaw from hitting the floor. 

_It’s a kid.  Thatcher called me to warn me that some little kid is wandering around asking questions about Fraser.  That can’t possibly be it.  She’s a distraction, a shill, she’s fucking bait.  Except this still makes no fucking sense.  There is no secret truth about Fraser; anyone wants to know about Fraser they can look at the public record.  In Canada._

“Sorry, kid,” he said, playing it as cool as possible.  “I don’t know what truth you’re talking about or why you think you might find it in my files.”

“He worked here for years,” said the kid.  “He lived in Chicago and was a liaison with the police department.  There are _newspaper articles_ and stuff about it.  You must have records about him.  And Detective Vecchio.  He was Constable Fraser’s partner.”

“One of ‘em, yeah,” said Ray, because she was right, all this stuff was public record, you could go to the library—or the internet, these days—and find old newspaper pics of Fraser and Vecchio, with names and everything attached.  Pictures of Fraser and Ray himself, too, for that matter. 

 _So why is this kid focused on Fraser-and-Vecchio?  Me and Frase were partners for longer, even if you don’t count the time I spent as Vecchio._   He decided maybe he wouldn’t offer her that piece of publicly-available info yet, see what would happen.

But she was quick on the uptake, because she narrowed her eyes and cocked her head to the side in a weirdly familiar way, and then she said, “You’re the other one.  The one who went to Canada with him and helped catch the people who stole the submarine.  Kowalski.”

“Quick, ain’t you, kid?  Yeah, that’s me, Lieutenant Ray Kowalski, the one and only.  And yeah, I was Fraser’s partner.  So you’ll understand that I get a little extra twitchy when people come around breaking into my office looking for information about him, right?  So look, why don’t you tell me what’s going on, here?”

“I told you.  I want to know about Benton Fraser.  And Detective Raymond Vecchio.”

“Sounds like you already know a whole lot about them.  You been doing research, ain’t that right?”

Her chin lifted stubbornly, but her voice stayed calm and matter-of-fact.  “Not everything about someone gets into the public record.”

 _Ain’t that the truth?_ he thought.  There were all sorts of things involving Fraser that never made it into the public record, but most of them were about unorthodox crime-solving behavior and harmless acts of freakishness.  Vecchio, now: all kinds of stuff not in the public record about Vecchio, stuff that all kinds of people might have wanted to know for all kinds of reasons.  But it was all so old there was moss growing on it: these days, nobody much even cared about Vecchio’s stint with the Mafia.

“You been calling up asking about Vecchio,” he asserted, because he hadn’t believed in coincidence for years, now.  “Which one are you really interested in, huh?”

The kid sighed.  “I was looking for Constable Fraser, but when I found out he was dead, I thought maybe his friends would be able to help me find out what I want to know.”

“Which is. . . ?”

She looked away, over his shoulder and then down at her feet, and her round lower lip pouted out a little as she answered, “Who he really was.”

“What, you think he had a secret identity?  Like Superman?” 

Fraser actually had been kind of like Superman—foiling bad guys and protecting the innocent, leaping off things in a single bound, even had the red coat.  But all that stuff was in the newspapers, with Fraser’s real name attached.

“Did he?” she countered.

“Who wants to know?” Ray counter-countered.

“Just me.”

“Sorry, but that’s ridiculous.  You’ve gotta know how ridiculous that sounds.  You’ve never met the guy, he died before you were born, practically—”  But no, she was older than that, ten or twelve.  “Before you were out of kindergarten, anyway—“ 

And Fraser would have pointed out all sorts of flaws in his reasoning, like the fact that Fraser was always meeting random kids and moms on the street and saving their lives and shit like that.  Plus with all the grown-ups Fraser helped, and all the grown-ups he put behind bars, it was totally likely that some of them told their kids about him.  And because this was Fraser, who attracted crazy like a magnet, it was also perfectly likely that someone’s kid would get some crazy idea into her head and trek from who-knows-where to do who-knows-what to Fraser, or for him.

But meanwhile Ray’s intuition was spitting out the answer for him, a fraction of a second before the kid sighed resignedly, looked at him with those big, sincere eyes, and said, “I think he might have been my father.”


	2. Chapter 2

The girl did look like Fraser.  Ray didn’t know how he’d missed it before, maybe the curly hair and the little-girl-ness was throwing him off, but now that she’d said what she’d said, the resemblance was obvious.  The shape of her mouth and eyes—especially when she was looking at him with that intent, focused expression that he’d seen on Fraser’s face a billion times.

_But even if it’s true, it don’t explain what she’s doing here supposedly alone, and it don’t prove that she ain’t up to something._

“All right, kid,” said Ray.  “If Fraser’s your dad—which I’m not saying I believe, but just for the sake of argument—who’s your mom?” 

Which was actually a damn good question, because if Fraser had ever had sex in his life, Ray was ninety-nine percent sure it hadn’t happened in the five years Ray had known him.  Also, Mr. Proper Preparation was about the last guy on the planet you’d expect to be leaving a trail of long-lost kids behind him if he _did_ get it on.

“You tell me,” the kid said.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“I don’t know if I can trust you,” the girl said.  “I came here to find out about Benton Fraser, and I know you know things about him, but you might not want to tell me the truth.”

“You got that right, kid,” Ray snorted.  “Right now, I ain’t got no reason to tell you anything at all.”

“I don’t need advice from you!” she snapped, scowling at the wall behind Ray.  “I have good reason to be suspicious of my sources.”

“Yeah, so do I,” said Ray, blinking at her sudden change of mood.  “I don’t know you from Mickey Mouse.  But you’re the one who’s sneaking around looting my files, so maybe you oughtta give me some reason why I should talk to you at all.”

“Do you even know?” Fiona asked.  “You were his partner for years, I figured you’d know all about him, but if you can’t figure out who my mother is, maybe you don’t know so much after all.”

Ray shook his head, letting the girl’s attempt at manipulation slide off him.

“Hey, maybe it ain’t such an easy question to answer,” he said.  “For all you know, Fraser was the kind of guy who slept with a different chick every week.”  He bit his tongue to keep from grinning at the thought of the look on Fraser’s face if he could hear that accusation.  Ray hadn’t often been able to shake Fraser up, but he bet that that one would have embarrassed him but good.  And probably sent him right into pompous lecture mode the next minute.  _First of all, Ray, I wish you wouldn’t use such disrespectful terminology to refer to women, who are, after all, our sisters. . ._

The comment seemed to have shaken Fiona up a little, which was the point.  For the first time, she looked uncertain.  Her gaze drifted off past his left shoulder again, and she didn’t say anything right away.

“For that matter,” said Ray.  “How come you don’t just ask your mom what you want to know?”

“She. . .doesn’t like to talk about my dad.”

“She know you’re here?”

“None of your business.”

_Which probably means no.  That would explain some things, anyway.  Canadian runaway, shit, how long’s she been missing. . . ?_

“Actually, it technically is my business,” he said, leaning back in his chair.  “If you’ve run away from home and your mom don’t know where you are, it’s part of my job to—“

She whipped around the desk and made a dash for the door, but he’d been expecting that and blocked her way.

“Uh uh, no.  And I wouldn’t think about the window, either.  Now look, we don’t gotta do this the hard way.  I’m perfectly happy to sit here and have a nice little chat with you, maybe even tell you something you want to know, but you gotta play nice with me.  That means you tell me stuff I want to know too, okay?”

“What kind of stuff?” she asked.

“Well, I don’t know yet.  All I’m saying is, we’ve gotta have some give and take, here.  Makes the world go ‘round.”

“I’m not your partner,” she muttered.

“Never said you were,” said Ray.  “Just offering to trade some info.”

She stared off into space for a few moments, her brows drawing together in a frown that reminded Ray of Fraser listening for the sound of a gun being cocked three floors down. 

“All right,” she said.  “But you answer my question first.  Who do you think my mother was?”

“Okay, deal.”  He held out his hand for her to shake; her grip was firm for a young girl.  Ray waved her back to her seat behind his desk.  She raised her eyebrows at him.

“So?” she asked.

And really, joking aside, it wasn’t like there was a wide field of women to choose from.  In fact, Ray had only even heard of one woman Fraser ever got past first base with, and yeah, the timing was about right, wasn’t it, because that was when Fraser had been in Chicago for a while, but before Ray met him.  Fraser had never mentioned her to Ray, but Ray had read about her in Vecchio’s file, and he’d always figured she was what was lurking between the lines of some of Fraser’s silences.

“Victoria Metcalf,” he said.

Something like disappointment flashed over Fiona’s face before she put on her defiant expression, chin up (and that was Fraser-like, too, the way she wiped her feelings off her face).

“No,” she said.

“No?  Seriously?  You’re not yanking my chain?”

“That’s not my mother’s name,” said Fiona.

“What is your mom’s name?”

“Ann Paulsen.” 

She looked at that spot right behind Ray again with an intensity that made him swivel around to see what the hell was so interesting on his office wall, but there was nothing to see.  Except. . .the kid sure looked like she was looking at something.  Her expression was slipping from defiant to lost and unhappy.

“I know you’re a liar,” she muttered, her voice quivering a little.

Ray opened his mouth to respond, and then the penny dropped: Fiona wasn’t just acting weird, she was acting Fraser-weird, and Fraser had once explained to Ray why he sometimes used to hold conversations with thin air.

“Hey, Fiona, who’re you talking to over there?” he asked.

And the kid wasn’t nearly as good at covering her tells as Fraser had been: that was a guilty jump right there.

“I’m talking to you.”  And that was a lie.

“You’ve got a ghost over there, don’t you?” he guessed.

She said nothing.

“It’s okay, you can say, I’ll believe you.  Fraser used to talk to his—“  _His dad, of course.  Chalk up another point for Fiona’s little theory, oh yeah._   “To ghosts, sometimes.  So why not you, too?”

She bit her lower lip and looked determinedly down at her hands.  Ray looked over his shoulder, but there was still nothing there, damn it.  He swallowed hard a couple of times, until he was pretty sure he could keep his voice steady and casual to ask the obvious question.

“He’s here, ain’t he?  Fraser?  That’s who you’re talking to?”

“I don’t know,” Fiona said to her lap, her voice not much louder than a whisper.  “It looks like him.  I mean, I found pictures of Benton Fraser, and they look like him, but. . .”  She looked up at him.  “You would know if it was him, wouldn’t you?  Can you test him, or something?”

“Sure, I guess so,” he said slowly.  He was used to weird, as much as you could ever be used to weird.  But the thought of Fraser—Fraser, who’d been dead and _gone_ for years—standing here in the room with him, here but not here and still _dead_. . .that made Ray’s stomach knot in a way that had nothing to do with how crazy the idea was.  This was no time to freak out, though, so he shook himself and tried to focus on the task at hand.

“But wait a sec,” he said.  “You don’t trust what I say, so how can anything I tell you prove whether your ghost is Fraser or not?”

Fiona looked back and forth between Ray and the air behind him and giggled.

“What?”

“You both said the same thing,” she said.

Ray couldn’t help grinning.

“And the answer,” said Fiona to the air, “Is that it would be another piece of evidence to confirm the. . .axiom.  Triangulation.  The photographs tell me you look like Benton Fraser.  He can tell me if you have Benton Fraser’s brain.  Okay, fine: mind.”  She turned back to Ray expectantly.

He closed his eyes, feeling light-headed and shaky, like he hadn’t eaten all day.

“Okay.”  _I can do this._   Opening his eyes, he took a breath and squared off at the empty corner of his office that looked just the same as always, no matter how he squinted.

“Okay, buddy, you up for a few rounds of Truth or Dare?”

Fiona giggled again, time-delayed.  Ray raised his eyebrows at her.

“He said that it would hardly be fair to include a Dare component, because he might not be able to do what you said and you wouldn’t be able to tell whether he did it anyway.  And besides, it would be both juvenile and not germane to the problem at hand.”

 _Germane._   _Yeah, that’s Fraser’s talk coming out of this girl’s mouth._

“Okay, then, we’ll stick to Truth.”  He thought for a second.  “Fraser, in the cemetery, when I was staking out Ellery and you, uh, came by to help out.  How many times did I shoot at the guys who were chasing us?”

After a short pause, Fiona said, “You missed seven times, then he gave you your glasses and your last two shots hit.”

“Right.  Okay, your turn.  Tell me something only Benton Fraser would know.”

Fiona listened for a little while.  Ray listened too, but he couldn’t hear anything.

“He says, remember the night Beth Botrelle was released.  You took her to her house and went inside with her to talk while he waited outside.  When you came out, the two of you sat together in your car.  You, um, he says you cried.”  She flicked an embarrassed glance at him.

“That’s right,” he said softly.  “And you can bet that’s not something I go around telling people.”

It was also not something Fraser had ever mentioned afterwards, through all the years of their friendship.  And yeah, it was a private thing, which made it a good thing for Fraser to pick for this game—but there was plenty of other stuff that only the two of them knew about.  And if there was one thing Fraser didn’t do, it was pick stories at random.  There was always a _point_ to them, you just had to figure out what he was getting at. 

_So, okay: Fraser wants Beth Botrelle on the table for some reason.  Why?_

“Who’s Beth Botrelle?” asked Fiona.

It took Ray a second to realize she was asking _him._   He shook his head.  He was getting way too comfortable with the idea of carrying on a one-way conversation with a ghost, way too fast.  And _that_ was way too much like the old days of working with Fraser, where some freakishly impossible thing happened once a week, and Fraser acted like it all made sense, and Ray ended up buying into it.

“She was a lady who was put in jail for killing her husband.  I was the one who arrested her; my testimony put her there.  But she was innocent.”  He scrubbed his hand over his face.  It wasn’t any easier to talk about—or think about—than it ever had been.  “They were gonna give her the needle—execute her.  Fraser helped me prove she was innocent, and they—they let her out.  It was almost too late.  Heck, it was eight years too late, but. . .they let her out.”

“And she was okay?” asked the girl quietly.

He sighed.  “Eight years in jail, especially when you know you didn’t do anything wrong but the whole world thinks you’re a murderer. . .that’s pretty freaking hard.  Changes you in ways that don’t go away, and not necessarily good ways.  But Beth was a da—a real strong lady, and yeah, I think she came out okay in the end.  Sends me a card every Christmas, if you can believe it.”

 _Moral of the story_ , he thought.  _Fraser’s stories always had a moral.  What does Fraser think the point about Beth Botrelle is?  And is the point for me, or for the kid?_

_Hell, I’m supposed to be the one asking the tricky questions._

“So, uh, Fraser.”  He stumbled over the name.  _Talking to a dead man._   “What’s the moral of the story?”

“I don’t want to know the moral,” snapped Fiona, and her scowl was definitely aimed a hundred percent at Ray this time.  “And I especially don’t want to hear a moral from _him._   That’s not evidence.”

“Not to you, maybe,” said Ray, trying to feel his way carefully.  Even allowing for the fact that kids are not known for their patience, this seemed like more than just the irritation of someone who’d heard too many of Fraser’s parables.  “But you want me to figure out whether you’ve got a _bona fide_ Benton Fraser on your hands, you gotta let me collect the evidence _I_ need.”

“He says I’m right,” said Fiona, looking more dubious than smug.  “He says telling you what he thinks about you and Beth Botrelle would be violating the spirit of our deal—which it totally would.”

“I don’t see how.  We agreed you’d tell me stuff, I’d tell you stuff, what’s the problem?”

“No, not _our_ deal.  His deal with me.”

“You got a deal with—with a ghost?  With Fraser?”

“Yes.”  Now she just looked sulky.

“And what, he’s not supposed to tell you Inuit stories?”

“You don’t need to know about it,” said Fiona.

“Sure, but you owe me a question.  I’ve answered two and you’ve only answered one.”

“I told you my mother’s name,” she said.  “You told me your guess, and you weren’t even right.  That’s one and one.”

“I answered your question about Beth Botrelle,” Ray pointed out.

“That doesn’t count,” she protested.

“Sure it does.  You asked me, I answered.” 

 _Jeez, talk with a kid for five minutes and I start sounding like one._  

Stella had always said Ray was good with kids because he was like them, but she hadn’t meant it as a compliment.  Come to think of it, Fraser had once said something like that, too, but as far as Ray could tell, he _had_ meant it as a compliment.  Whatever, it wasn’t like Ray did it on purpose, but being juvenile did turn out to come in handy every once in a while.

But apparently Fiona was more mature than Ray _or_ your average kid, because instead of prolonging the yes-I-did-no-you-didn’t stuff, she said, “Okay, you’re right. That’s two.  But you never finished answering about _him_.  Whether he’s really Benton Fraser.”

“You got a point, there,” he conceded.  “Well, you want to talk about evidence, I don’t think Fraser would’ve told anyone that stuff about the cemetery and Beth Botrelle, but I can’t swear he didn’t.  So, it’s good circumstantial evidence, but technically it’s possible that what you’ve got there is the ghost of some guy who at some point got Fraser to tell him some kind of personal stories about me.  And who, according to you, looks a lot like Fraser.   Although I don’t know, for all I know ghosts can look like anything they want.  So maybe we shouldn’t count that as evidence, one way or the other.” 

Fiona looked worried at that last point—he didn’t blame her, he kind of wished he hadn’t thought of it himself—but then apparently Mr. Invisible said something to annoy her, because she wrinkled her nose and groused, “You’re not taking this _seriously._ ”

Ray raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“He says that your logic is admirable, but that you also shouldn’t discount the possibility that he’s the ghost of someone who had plastic surgery.”

Ray choked on a burst of laughter.

“That’s not funny, it’s just dumb,” said Fiona.

“Yeah, well, ten-year-old jokes tend to be pretty dumb,” said Ray.  “Hey, Fraser, I got jacks over eights, what’ve you got?”

“A crowded home?” Fiona relayed, with more nose-wrinkling.  “And you still owe him three hundred and forty-seven of air.”

Ray grinned.  “Well, kid, if that ain’t Benton Fraser, he’ll do ‘till the real one comes along.  You want my certified opinion, there it is.”

“Because he told you a joke?”

“Because if you’re gonna fake being someone else, that’s the stuff that will trip you up every time.  You can memorize as much information as you want, you can learn a guy’s habits, practice his tics and twitches, but don’t try to joke with his best friend, ‘cause you’ll screw it up in a thousand little ways.  Your ghost talks like Fraser, _jokes_ like Fraser.  It’s him, all right.”

Fiona nodded.  “Okay.”

“You believe me?  Don’t think I’m lying to you?”

“I don’t think you could have been faking that conversation,” she said, slowly, like she was thinking it through.  “You can’t even hear what he’s saying.  You do know each other.  But I also think you really were surprised that he’s a ghost and he’s here.  So I don’t think you could have planned anything with him.  I guess you could really be his friend but be lying about who he is.  But there’s no simple explanation for why you’d want to do that.  Occam’s Razor says you’re telling the truth.”

“Whose razor?  I bet you learned that from Fraser, whatever it means.”

“It means that the simplest solution is most likely to be right.  And yes.”

Ray shook his head, laughing.  “One thing you gotta learn about Fraser is, when he’s around, the simplest solution is almost never the right one.  It’s all lake-pirates and voodoo and the obvious suspect ain’t hardly ever the one that did it.  And he talks about logic.  Pssh.  I mean, look at you, you’ve got a ghost hanging around with you, that ain’t the obvious answer to anything.”

“I think you’re confusing _simple_ with _plausible,_ ” said Fiona, sounding very Fraser-like.  “Remember what Sherlock Holmes said: once you’ve eliminated the impossible—“

“Yeah, yeah, whatever remains, however ridiculous, that’s the truth.  I’m just warning you, it can be kind of hard to figure out what counts as impossible sometimes.  Like, you know, ghosts.  Not on the list, for me, any more.  So, okay, we’ve established that I believe you’re haunted by the ghost of Benton Fraser—”  Funny how it was getting easier to just spit that out casually, like it was nothing.  “—and that you’re willing to take my word for it.  I guess that’s progress, right?”

“I suppose so,” she said.

“My turn to ask a question, now.”  He knew he ought to see if she was willing to cough up some information about where she came from and whether her mom knew she was missing, but his curiosity got the better of him.  “How’d you come to get, um, haunted, anyway?  How long’s Fraser been hanging around with you?”

She paused, not looking over at the corner where Fraser was apparently hanging out.  Then she shrugged and said, “Since I was six, almost seven.  About six years.”

“Six years?” Ray repeated, startled.

She nodded.

He counted backwards.  “So, 2002?  What month?”

“I don’t remember exactly.  Winter.  There was snow on the ground.”

 _Snow on the ground, dirty with road-slush and foot-tracks, splattered with red, red, red, and Fraser a crumpled pile of red serge in a puddle of red blood. . ._   Ray swallowed and stared hard at his cluttered desk until the flash of memory passed.

“The end of the year, towards Christmas,” Fiona added.

“Sounds like he must’ve, uh. . .showed up to you pretty soon after he died.”

“I think that’s right,” she said.  “The obituary I read said he died on December third.  Is that true?”

“Yeah.” 

 _She don’t mean to be insensitive_ , he reminded himself.  _Fraser’s just a name in the newspaper to her, even if she does think he was her father.  And she’s just a kid.  She don’t know how cold she sounds._

“Look, Fiona, could you. . .”  He took a breath.  “Fraser was my best friend, okay, and he, uh, I was there when he died, and I just. . .I’m happy to talk with you about him, but I’d appreciate it if you could. . .I don’t know, be gentle?”

Fiona frowned.  “But he’s not dead.  I mean, he’s not _dead-_ dead, he’s right _here._ ”

 _Not for me._   He bit back the words; it wasn’t Fiona’s fault she could see Fraser and he couldn’t.

“I know that,” he said instead.  “And maybe you don’t think that’s creepy, you’ve had most of your life to get used to the idea of dead guys just dropping in for tea, but you’ve gotta understand, it’s freaking me out a little, here.”

“Oh.  I’m sorry.”  And that look on her face—that combination of your-reality-is-news-to-me with genuine sympathy—was so fucking _Fraser_ that Ray had to close his eyes for a second.

“He says. . .”  Fiona’s voice was softer and more tentative than he’d heard out of her yet.  “He says he knows how you feel.  But he found it comforting when his father—your father was a ghost?” she interrupted herself.

“Not the same, buddy,” Ray bit out, turning to put his shoulder between him and the invisible man.  “Not the same thing.”

_Fraser standing there with his palms outstretched, a blotch of red against the dirty snow, and Ray’s too fucking far away.  His gun’s in his hand as he runs as fast as he can without falling on his face in the slush, but he’s too far away and there are too fucking many guns coming up to point at Fraser. . ._

“Why are you angry?” asked Fiona, even softer.

Ray sighed and forced his shoulders to relax and his voice to be quiet, at least.  “I ain’t mad at you.  I’m. . .  It’s complicated, and I really don’t feel like talking about it right now.  When someone close to you dies, it can kind of. . .mess you up.  Don’t worry; I ain’t crazy or nothing.” 

Fiona nodded solemnly.  “All right.”

“Look, uh, you were telling me how you started. . .seeing Fraser when you were little.  He never told you his name, all that time?”

“No.”  Fiona was still looking at him kind of warily, but she answered willingly enough.  “The first time I met him, he said his name wasn’t important.  I asked him if he was Santa Claus.  Because of—”

“The red coat?  Sure.  He didn’t say yes, did he?”

“No.  I didn’t really believe in Santa Claus anyway, except, you know, there was this man appearing out of nowhere, so I thought maybe all those things I thought were just stories were true after all.  But he said no, he wasn’t Santa Claus, but I could make up a name for him if I wanted.  So I just started calling him Santa, and then, after a while, that was just what I called him.  I was little.”

“You ever tell anyone you had a mysterious friend who appears and disappears into thin air?”

“No.”  Fiona crossed her arms, her voice going flat.  “People would have thought I was crazy.”

“You knew that when you were six?”

Fiona didn’t answer.

He tried a different tack.  “You didn’t even tell your mom?”

“No.  Your turn to answer a question.”

“Okay.  Shoot.”  _Time to back off and get the witness to relax again._

Fiona paused, maybe considering what question would give her the best bang for her buck.  “Where’s Raymond Vecchio?”

“Sorry, can’t tell you that.”  _Not ‘til I know a damn sight more about why you want to know, anyway._

Fiona scowled.  “You promised.”

“I said I’d answer questions.  I didn’t say I’d answer any and all questions.  There’s a lot of stuff I’m not allowed to just go around telling people.  One of the rules of my job.”

“So, you’re not going to tell me anything interesting.”

Ray sighed.  “I’ll try.  But think about it from my point of view.  There’s lots of nasty people who might be mad at a cop for arresting their friends or whatever.  Who might go looking for him so they could do something bad to him.”  _Like Victoria Metcalf, just for example.  And maybe she’s not your mom, or maybe you really did run away from home and Mom has no idea you’re here. . .but I know where Mr. What’s-His-Face with the razor would place his bets._

“How come you’ll tell me stuff about Constable Fraser but not about Detective Vecchio?”

 _Because Fraser’s dead._   But there was no point in dropping the fact that Vecchio was still alive if she didn’t already know that for sure.

“Well, for one thing, because I believe you about his ghost.”  Ray jerked his thumb at the corner.  “That’s a pretty special circumstance, there.  And also—you didn’t ask, so I won’t count this as part of the trade—but I’d lay dollars to donuts Fraser really was your father.  You look a lot like him.  That don’t automatically make you one of the good guys—”  Although it was damn hard to look at Fraser’s earnest eyes in that pretty little girl’s face and suspect her of anything shady.  “But it does mean you got some extra right to know about him.”

Fiona chewed that over. 

“I guess that makes sense,” she said, although she didn’t look too happy about it.  “Will you help me figure out what happened when Constable Fraser met my mother?  Because so far, the only thing you’ve told me about that wasn’t even true.”

“Sure,” said Ray.  “And hey, I never heard about no Ann Paulsen, but I didn’t meet Fraser until after you were already born.  Could be he met her and I just never heard about it.  Tell you what, though, there’s an easy way to check whether I’m wrong about your mother’s name or not.”

“What’s that?”

“Got records on Victoria Metcalf.  Easy enough to call ‘em up, check her picture.  How about it?”

For a minute he thought she was going to refuse, but then she visibly put her stiff upper lip on and nodded.  “Okay.  Show me.  But you have to let me watch you call up the records so I know what you asked for.”

“Nuh-uh, you don’t get to look at the security screens.  Name’ll be all over the records, it’ll be obvious.”

Fiona frowned, but didn’t protest.  Ray made a shooing gesture at her until she turned her back and put her hands over her eyes.  He couldn’t tell if she was being way too serious about not peeking, or making fun of him.  Probably both.

Ray logged in and called up the records from the old, cold Metcalf case.  The original bank robbery had been in Alaska, and Fraser had arrested her in Canada after she’d fled over the border, but Metcalf’s rap sheet had been obtained for the Chicago case file.  The records included Metcalf’s mug shots, more than twenty years out of date now.  They showed a beautiful young woman with masses of dark, curly hair, who couldn’t have been much more than twenty when the pictures were taken.  She could easily have passed for Fiona’s big sister.  And Ray could tell from the girl’s face that she recognized Metcalf, all right. 

_Yeah, that’s Mom, no question._

He let her look; let her read the file: bank robbery, getaway car, escaped to Canada, arrested by Constable Fraser, extradited, served 10 years, supposedly dead in a car crash only not really.  Wanted for murder of “Jolly” Hughes, for arson on a cabin owned by Benton Fraser, for evidence tampering, for receiving stolen diamonds.  Escaped from Chicago, whereabouts unknown.

_But not for fucking long.  Screw running away from home; this ‘quest’ of Fiona’s has Metcalf’s fingerprints all over it.  She’s here, somewhere close, any minute now the shit is going to hit the fan, and I’m not gonna see it coming, because she’s damn good, I got that much even if no one ever wanted to tell me the whole story.  This kid is just her advance guard, probably she’s here to distract me while her mother does whatever it is she’s gonna do._

_Except, Fraser.  She can’t be faking Fraser, can she?  Not some kid who never met him, no way she could know that stuff, know how he’d say it.  Fraser’s here.  And Fraser wouldn’t help them set me up.  No way, no how.  Except, what can a ghost do to stop someone from doing something?_


	3. Chapter 3

_Victoria Metcalf._   Her mother’s face stared at her from the photographs on Lieutenant Kowalski’s computer screen.  Fiona wanted to believe it was a coincidence, but she knew it wasn’t anyone else.  Her mother was really young in the pictures, but it was obviously her.

 _Okay, but it still doesn’t have to mean. . ._   She read the words on the screen again.  _Bank robbery.  Arson.  Murder._

“You can’t believe everything you read, sweetheart,” said her mother’s voice in her ear.

Startled, Fiona couldn’t keep from twitching, but she did manage to keep her eyes on the screen.  She was used to Santa—Benton Fraser, Constable Fraser, she should get used to thinking of him by his real name—appearing abruptly, but he didn’t usually do it when she was with other people.  But her mother was less careful, or maybe it was just that since. . .since Fiona had left home, there were other people around most of the time. 

Lieutenant Kowalski was giving her a funny look, so she let her lower lip tremble—not hard at all right now—and hoped he’d think she’d jumped because of something she’d read on the screen.

“That her?” he asked, his voice gruff but gentle.

Fiona nodded and looked away from the computer, taking the opportunity to glance around the room.  Her mother was standing behind her chair (the Lieutenant, sitting with one hip on the edge of the desk, was staring straight through her).  Santa—Constable Fraser, darn it!—was gone, which Fiona had mostly expected.  She hadn’t noticed him vanishing, but she’d never yet seen both him and her mother at the same time.  Maybe there was some sort of rule about it.

“I’m sorry,” said Lieutenant Kowalski.

“I don’t see why,” Fiona replied.  “You just did what I asked you to.”

“Sure, but. . .”  He shrugged.  “It’s probably not the answer you were hoping for.”

“I know you’ve got a lot of questions you can’t ask me right now,” said her mother.  “But you need to ask yourself, what story is this man trying to tell you?  How do these files fit into it?  And how can you tell whether it’s true?”

“They’re pretty careful about what they write in these kind of files, right?” said Fiona, choosing her words carefully to reply to her mother while addressing the Lieutenant.  “I mean, they don’t put things into the records that they’re not sure about?  They stick to evidence, and facts they can prove?”

“Well, _prove_ , that’s pretty tricky to do, if you mean absolutely a hundred percent,” he replied.  “But everything in the report is supposed to be as objective as we can make it, and we’re pretty strict about what’s evidence and what’s inference and where information comes from.”

“The trouble with the system,” said her mother, “Is that it assumes that the police officers involved are reporting the truth, or at least what they think is true.  It’s very vulnerable to corruption from within.”

“What if the police officers who write the reports don’t tell the truth?” Fiona asked.

Lieutenant Kowalski frowned, started to say something, then stopped, his frown deepening.  “That’s why we got regs, and documentation, and the whole frigging justice system.  So we can catch people when they falsify information, or get it wrong, or, or just screw up.  But, look. . .just because you don’t want to believe it, don’t mean it ain’t true.  Lot of people involved in putting together the information in these files, at different times, some here, some in other places.  And no reason for them to lie.”

“Oh, there’s always _someone_ who profits by a lie,” said her mother, but Fiona didn’t need to hear that to know that Lieutenant Kowalski was oversimplifying.  _He wants it to be true.  Or maybe he just wants me to believe it.  Which?_

“How do you know that?” Fiona asked him.  “I mean, you said you weren’t around then, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“So, how do you know that everything in there is true?  How do you know that no one had a reason to lie?”

“I—”  He bit off whatever he was going to say and his mouth twisted for a second, like he was tasting something nasty.  He looked over at the empty corner of the room where Constable Fraser had been, then down at his hands. 

“I know these people, okay?” he said, finally, in a tight voice.  “Not all of ‘em, but all these Chicago-side guys?  I worked with some of ‘em for years.  They weren’t dirty.  _Fraser_ sure as hell wasn’t dirty, which is what you really want to know, right?”

“He’s very loyal, isn’t he?” said her mother, with an ironic little smile.  “He doesn’t want to believe his friends could be anything other than good and honest.  Or maybe he’s just very protective of their reputations.  Cops stick by their own, you know.  It’s them against the rest of the world.”

“Do you know Detective Vecchio, too?” Fiona asked the Lieutenant.  “He wrote a lot of the report.”

“Yeah, I do know him, and no, he ain’t dirty, either.”

“But he was Constable Fraser’s friend,” said Fiona.  “He wouldn’t have wanted to get his friend in trouble.  Or he might have trusted his friend and not believed he could have done anything. . .not so nice.”

She looked straight up into his eyes as she said it, and she saw him flinch, though he tried to hide his reaction.

“Score one,” said her mother, and Fiona didn’t have to see her to know she was smiling.  Fiona kept her own face solemn and wide-eyed and let Lieutenant Kowalski be the first to look away.

“Listen, kid,” he said roughly.  “You got some kind of theory you’re working with here?  Maybe some information to go on?  Or are you just making up stories ‘cause you don’t like the idea that maybe your mom. . .”  He sighed, scratching the short hair at the back of his head.  “. . .did some stuff that wasn’t very nice.”

Of course she didn’t have very much solid information, that was the whole problem.  What she had was _hearsay_ , and not even enough of that.  But he didn’t need to know that.

“Constable Fraser was corrupt,” she said in a confident tone, like it was a fact.  “He used his position to commit crimes and get away with it.  And his friends protected him.”

Lieutenant Kowalski leaned down with his hands on the desk and his face right up close to hers, teeth bared.  For a second, she was afraid he was actually going to _bite_ her, but that was just silly, so she forced herself not to cringe away from him.

“No.  Fucking.  Way,” he bit out.  “Not Fraser; not possible.”

He took a breath and backed off, and when he spoke again he sounded much less scary.  “Anyone else, maybe I’d have to think about it.  But you don’t know—no, damn it, you _do_ know, you’ve known the guy for years.  You must know how fu--freaking ridiculous that is.”

“I know he lied to me,” she snapped back without thinking.  Then she caught sight of her mother’s shocked face and realized she’d just made a bad mistake. 

And maybe it didn’t matter: why should she worry about her promise?  Constable Fraser didn’t deserve to have her do what he wanted.  But no, that was _specious_ , it didn’t matter what kind of person you made a promise to, the promise itself was the important thing.  And besides, her mother was. . .her mother had. . .kept things from her, just as much as he had.  Whether the file was true or not.

Her mother’s expression had smoothed itself into the raised-eyebrows, sharp-eyed look she always got when Fiona had done something maybe she wasn’t supposed to and her mother was waiting to hear her explanation.  Her you’re-not-in-trouble- _yet_ face.

_I could have lied to Lieutenant Kowalski, told him some story about meeting Constable Fraser.  She doesn’t know I didn’t._

But what could she say that would sound to her mother like she’d met the Constable when he was _alive_ , but also make sense to the Lieutenant, _and_ keep him from saying anything else that would give it all away?  Before she could come up with anything, Lieutenant Kowalski started talking again, and it was too late.

“Lied to you?” he asked.  “Or just didn’t tell you the whole truth?  Not that I’m saying he shouldn’t’ve come clean about being your dad, but what was he going to tell a six-year-old?  ‘Hi, I’m the ghost of your dead father, pleased to meet you’?”

“This is all fascinating, Fiona.”  Her mother’s voice was soft, but there was danger in it.  “But I’m wondering why I’m hearing about it first from some. . .American cop.”

Fiona didn’t dare try to answer her, so she kept her eyes fixed on Lieutenant Kowalski.  “He lied about who he was and why he was. . .there.  After that, I can’t trust _anything_ he told me.  That’s why I need to find out the truth.”

“Yeah, smart kid, why would you take a con job on faith?” he muttered.  He shook his head like he was trying to get rid of a distracting thought. 

“Listen, have you asked him about any of this stuff?” he went on.  “Why he did what he did?  For that matter—”  He glanced past Fiona, over to where he probably still thought Fraser was standing.  “Why don’t you ask him what he has to say about what’s in these files?  About Victoria Metcalf?” 

“Now there’s an interesting question,” purred her mother.  “What would Benton Fraser be saying right now, if he were here?  What do you think, Fiona?”

“I don’t care what he has to say,” Fiona told the Lieutenant.

“Well, I do,” he said.  “And you should.  You don’t refuse to take someone’s statement just because you think they might lie to you.  What Fraser says is evidence, just as much as anything else.  Hey, Fraser,” he said to the empty corner. “Why don’t you just tell the kid your side of the story, huh?  You guys may have some kind of sulking contest going on, but she’s dying to hear it.  I sure am.”

Fiona’s mother walked slowly over to the corner, swinging her hips, until she was standing right where Lieutenant Kowalski was looking.  Gathering up her long, dark hair in one hand, she tipped her head to one side and looked at him as though she were considering something fascinating.  It looked weirdly like something Santa—Constable Fraser—did sometimes, when Fiona asked him a tricky question.

“Let me see,” said her mother mockingly.  “Shall I start with the diamonds that I stole when the fence refused to take my stolen money for them?  I notice the details about that didn’t make it into your files.  Or maybe I should explain why I tore my _dear friend_ Detective Vecchio’s house apart to get hold of the key to the locker where we’d stashed the money?” 

“What’s he saying?” asked Lieutenant Kowalski impatiently.

Her mother’s voice dropped from a sarcastic lilt to a furious hiss as she paced back and forth like a cornered wolf.  Fiona couldn’t help staring at her.

“Would you like to hear about how I made sure that the police never talked to anyone who knew the true story of how the money got stolen, only to me?  Or how two of my accomplices ended up dead and the third one barely escaped with her life and had to spend the rest of her life hiding in the back end of nowhere so I couldn’t find her?  Oh, and by the way, I got her _pregnant,_ but that scarcely matters—after all, it’s not _illegal._   If she was stupid enough to fall for my handsome face, that’s hardly my fault, now is it?”

“Stop it!” yelled Fiona, pressing her hands over her ears.  “You’re not helping!”

“What did he say?” Lieutenant Kowalski repeated sharply.

“Not helping?” snapped her mother at the same time.  “What exactly am I not helping with, Fiona?  What else are you hiding from me?”

“ _Go away!”_   Fiona squeezed her eyes tight and shoved her hands against her ears so hard it hurt.

The little office went suddenly quiet.

When Fiona got her breathing back under control and opened her eyes, the only person she could see was Lieutenant Kowalski, who was watching her with a worried frown.

“You okay, there?” he asked.

“Yes.  I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no skin off my nose.”  He shrugged, then glanced around the empty office.  “Is Fraser. . .still here?”

“No, he’s gone,” she said, which was true, after all.

“You can just snap your fingers and make him disappear?”  He looked both disturbed and impressed.

Fiona shrugged.  Constable Fraser sometimes left when she asked him to, sometimes not.  Her mother. . .Fiona had never told her to leave before.  Anyway, it wasn’t any of Lieutenant Kowalski’s business.  He was keeping secrets from her, why should she tell him hers?

“What did Fraser say to upset you like that?” asked Lieutenant Kowalski.

“Where’s Detective Vecchio?” she countered.

“Where’s your mother?” he shot back.

“I’m not going to tell you.  You’d want to arrest her because your stupid file says so.”  Not that he _could_ , but she didn’t have to tell him that.

He showed her a tight smile.  “She makes trouble in my city, I’ll arrest her, don’t matter who she is.” He tapped the top of the computer monitor.  “Last time she was here, she made a whole lot of trouble.  Now she’s maybe back, you can’t blame me for being a little twitchy.”

“I don’t have to help you find her.”

“Fair enough,” he said.  “You want to protect her; I get that.  On the other hand, I don’t got to let you run around making trouble, either.  If she ain’t in town, that makes you a runaway kid and I ought to be handing you over to the child services people or finding out where you belong and sending you back there to be someone else’s problem.  Heck, I could just hand you over to the Mounties, let them sort it out.”

“No!”

“Don’t like that idea?”

Fiona launched herself out of the chair, but Lieutenant Kowalski beat her to the door and put his back against it.

“Hey, hey, hey, what are you so scared about?  You on the run from something besides your mom?”

 _Peering through branches, she watches the men in their blue uniforms tromping in and out of the house, their deep voices muffled by snow and distance.  Calling to each other, pawing over her things, her mother’s things.  She breathes through her mouth, silent and still, clutching her backpack to her chest._  

Fiona took a breath and took a gamble.

“Please don’t send me back to Canada,” she whispered.  “Don’t tell them I’m here.  The bad men will get me.”

Lieutenant Kowalski frowned.  “What bad men?”

“The ones who killed my mother.”

“What?  Your mother—here, come on, sit down.  I won’t bite you,” he said, his voice gentle again.  “But you got to tell me about this.  What happened?”  He waved her back to the desk chair, then straddled the second chair himself, resting his crossed arms on its back and peering at her intently.

 _“Most people aren’t very good at lying,”_ Fiona’s mother had told her once. _“If you want to fool someone, the best way is to stay as close to the truth as possible and just slip the lie in where it fits.”_

Santa had said almost the same thing, in a different context. _“The hardest lies to spot are the ones that are mostly true, with just a few crucial details changed.”_

So Fiona began: “My mother was—someone killed her.  I don’t know who.  They came to our house—men I didn’t know—they went through everything, I don’t know what they were looking for.  I was hiding in the woods, they didn’t know I was there.”  All true, except for the missing detail that the men who came to the house were uniformed Mounties.

“You saw it happen?” the Lieutenant asked softly.

She shook her head.  “I only saw them at the house.  M-my mother always said that if anything happened to her, I had to get away.  There was emergency money and things, hidden in a place she showed me.  She said, take it and run.  So I did.”  That was all true, too.

“All the way to Chicago?  Why didn’t you go to the police?”

Fiona’s stomach squirmed at the thought.  _Not our friends.  Can’t trust them.  Never talk to the police.  They might pretend to help you, but they have their own agenda.  Don’t let them see you.  I won’t let the Mounties take you away. . ._

“They wouldn’t listen to me, I’m just a kid,” said Fiona.  Lieutenant Kowalski opened his mouth to argue, so she let panic tumble out of her mouth: “They’d put me somewhere, an _institution_ , they’d never let me out, that’s what happens to orphan kids who don’t have any family and I’m not even supposed to _exist._ ”

“How’s that?”  He frowned in confusion.

“Nobody knows I exist.  I mean, Canada doesn’t.  The government.  I’m not registered for health insurance and I don’t have a citizenship card or anything.  If the police find out, I’ll be in trouble.”

“I’m pretty sure that ain’t the way it works,” he said mildly.  “Ain’t your fault your mom didn’t get you a birth certificate, for one thing.”

“Please, don’t.  Don’t tell them.  I don’t want to go to one of those places.”

“Don’t you want to help the Mounties catch whoever killed your mom?”

“What if it was Mounties who did it?” she asked.

Lieutenant Kowalski grimaced.  "The Mounties weren’t out to kill her, Fiona.  They would have arrested her if they’d known who she was, but cops don’t just go around killing people.”

“But they do kill people sometimes.”

“Yeah.  And then there’s a formal investigation, not to mention the press goes bonkers, and usually the cop ends up in a lot of trouble,” he said grimly.

“Only if people find out,” said Fiona.  “If you wanted to kill someone, I bet you could make it so no one found out you’d done it.  Especially if you had other policemen helping you.”

He closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head, looking not just grim, but sick.

“Okay,” he said after a moment.  “I think you’re wrong.  I think you’re making up stories ‘cause you want to believe them, or maybe you’re just trying to put me on a wrong track.  But I won’t bet on that right yet.  I’m going to call up the RCMP and find out what they have to say about Ann Paulsen, starting with if she actually exists and was actually killed.  But I won’t tell them about you.  Yet.”

“Are you going to tell them about—what’s in your files?” asked Fiona.

“If your mom’s dead, telling the police her real name can’t hurt her, and it might help them find out what happened.”

“If they’re really trying to find out.”

“If there’s some kind of cover-up going on, it’s a good bet the people involved already know who your mom was.  But all right: if your story checks out, I won’t say anything about Victoria Metcalf.  Not right now, anyway.”

“I expect they do already know her name,” said Fraser’s gentle voice behind her, as Lieutenant Kowalski reached across the desk for the phone.  “But Ray’s wrong about one thing.  A dead person can still be hurt by the living.  And vice versa.”

 

                        *                                    *                                    *

 

After hours on a Friday night was not the best time to try to shake information out of the RCMP, but Ray hadn’t worked all those years with Fraser without fostering a few international relations.  And the computer system up there was good enough these days that a night-shift officer in Ottawa could pull up the case file on the murder of one Ann Paulsen, found shot in the head three weeks ago outside of Dawson City, which was apparently not actually a city, but a one-horse town in the Yukon.

“Any leads on what happened?” Ray asked.

“Well, it was a bit mysterious at first, as it turned out that what identifying documents she had were forged.  She doesn’t appear to have been a resident of the immediate area, or at least, no one we’ve talked to admits to having heard of her.  But we did turn up what looks like a positive match on her real identity.”

“Oh yeah?  She have a record or something?”

Fiona frowned at him, but Ray shrugged back at her, holding up a finger to tell her to hold her horses.

“Yes,” said the night-duty officer.  “The face and dental records are a good match for a wanted criminal named Victoria Metcalf.  American, originally, but with Canadian connections.  She served time in Alaska for bank robbery, got out in 1995, but then turned around and got into more trouble.  Oh, of course, that was in Chicago.  Is that why you’re asking?”

“Actually, yeah,” said Ray.  “Name came up in passing, thought I’d better follow up.  You’re pretty sure about the ID?”  He shook his head apologetically at Fiona.  _Told you so._  

“Reasonably sure,” said the officer.  “But the records on Metcalf are a decade out of date; more, most of them.  We’re tentatively accepting the identification, but we’re alive to the possibility that we might be mistaken.  Especially since she fooled the police once before, passing off her sister’s dead body as her own.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Ray.  “Well, whoever the dead woman was, you got any idea who killed her?  Or why?”

“We have a few leads, nothing solid.  Given the identification, we’re considering possible connections to a case from a few years back.  Robbery of a smallish bank in Whitehorse.  Quite a clever set-up, actually, but there was a foul-up during the getaway that ended with a critically injured teller, a dead bystander, one robber dead and another in custody.  The live one, Roland Cunningham, had been the driver, and it was pretty clear that he hadn’t been involved in the killing, nor was there any evidence he’d ever had the money, so he was only convicted of being an accessory to the crimes.”

“Blamed everything on the dead guy?” asked Ray.

“Ah, there’s the interesting part,” said the officer.  “He blamed everything on a supposed third partner in the scheme, a woman, who had made good her escape.  No witnesses confirmed seeing her, but on the other hand, a substantial amount of money went missing and was never recovered.”

“Yeah, okay, I see where this is going.  You got reason to think this woman was Metcalf?  Or Paulsen?  Or both?”

“Cunningham gave her name as Melissa Fraser, but no such person appeared to exist.  The original investigation found that the artist’s reconstruction portrait was a pretty good match for old mug shots of Victoria Metcalf, and when those were shown to Cunningham, he confirmed her identity.  But no trace of her was found, so eventually the search was abandoned.”

“He wasn’t just making stuff up to take the heat off himself?” asked Ray. 

“Well, that wasn’t entirely clear, but the officers in charge of the investigation were inclined to believe Cunningham because of the depth of rage he displayed against his supposed partner.  He claimed that she had set the two men up for a fall so she could escape with the money.  He was so eager to convince the arresting officers, and eventually the jury, of her guilt that he incriminated himself further than he might have done had he kept silent about her.”

“So. . .what, you think Cunningham—“ He glanced at Fiona, who was watching him intently.  “Uh, was responsible for the murder?  He still in prison?”

“He got out a year ago, on parole.  From all reports, he seemed to have reformed and was leading an unremarkable life.  Then, two months ago, he disappeared.  What evidence we’ve turned up so far suggests that when last seen, he was heading for the Yukon.”

“So, it would fit. . .but there’s no solid evidence to think it was him?”

“Precisely.  And, of course, this is only one possibility.  Still, it’s the most promising lead so far.  I don’t suppose you have any information that might tie in either with Cunningham or with some alternate motivation for someone to have wanted to murder either Victoria Metcalf or Ann Paulsen?”

Ray glanced at Fiona.  He thought about Vecchio putting a bullet in Fraser’s back on a train platform.  He thought about the guys who’d been around for the Metcalf case, the anger in their voices the couple of times he’d caught snippets of talk about it.

_Bullshit.  Whatever else went down, none of them was tracking her to the North Pole to whack her thirteen years after the fact._

“Not right now,” he told the officer.  “You send me the stats on Cunningham, I can keep a lookout for him.” 

“Will do.  I can send you the serial numbers for the stolen money as well, though since the bills are Canadian, the only place someone might try to pass them in the U.S. is at a bank or an exchange bureau.”

“I’ll do what I can.  Thanks for everything.”

“Have a good evening, _Leftenant_ ,” said the officer cheerfully, and hung up.

“All right,” Ray told Fiona.  “Your story checks out so far, and you probably figured out that they already got the idea about your mom’s real name, so that checks out, too.”  _Mostly._

“Okay,” said Fiona softly.

“It sounds like they ain’t caught the guys that did it—you think there was more than one?”

“I don’t know.  There were three or four at the house, but I don’t know. . .I didn’t see. . .”  She was shrinking into herself, her voice getting fainter and higher.

“It’s okay,” he said gently.  “Don’t worry about it right now.  We’re going to need to talk about it later, but it can wait a bit.  Now, listen: I don’t know whether whoever did it has any reason to come after you, but it’s possible.” 

_Would someone chase down a kid for a backpack full of money?  To get revenge on someone who’s already dead?  Or…maybe get a lever on someone who maybe isn’t really dead?_

 “So I ain’t going to tell Canada you exist, for right now, anyway,” he went on.  “And we won’t advertise who you are and where you came from, around here.  I’ll keep you safe, but that means you got to stick with me and do like I say.”

“You won’t. . .send me away?  To one of those places where they put children who have lost their parents?”  She sounded really scared, which wouldn’t have been unusual coming from an inner city kid: a lot of them grew up distrusting social workers and foster care and all of that, sometimes with good reason.  He was surprised that a kid from rural Canada would feel the same way, but on the other hand, Fiona was basically an illegal alien in her own country, and now she was on the lam. 

_Yeah, Mommy told her not to let the bogeymen catch her, and she took it a little too serious._

“We don’t got to bring child services into this yet,” he promised.  DCFS would be pissed at him if he stalled too long before bringing them into the loop, but damn it, protecting people from possible murder or kidnapping was his job, not theirs.  And maybe once he got Fiona trusting him a little, he could work on convincing her that foster care wasn’t some kind of Oliver-Twist-type orphanage. 

“But I got to find you a place to sleep while we’re dealing with everything,” he went on.  “Somewhere I can protect you, see?”  _And make sure you don’t skip out on me, while I’m at it._

He wondered if it would be okay to take her to Frannie’s.  He didn’t want Frannie’s kids getting in the way of a bad guy coming after Fiona; he tried hard not to get Frannie mixed up in dangerous shit for exactly that reason.  On the other hand, he already had people watching her house, and he could get Frannie to let him sleep in her spare room where he could keep a closer eye on things himself.  He’d have to tell her who Fiona was, but that would be okay: Frannie could keep her mouth shut when it mattered. 

_And hell, she’d never forgive me if she knew I had Fraser’s daughter and didn’t tell her._

“Okay, look,” he told Fiona.  “I tell you what we’ll do.  I have a friend who looks after kids who. . .need a place to stay for a little while.  I’ll give Frannie a call and—”

“Um, Lieutenant Kowalski?” Fiona interrupted.  She pronounced it _leftenant_ , too, he noticed.

“What?”

“I think Constable Fraser is trying to get your attention.”

Ray looked over at the corner of the room that was just as empty as ever, as far as he could see.

“What, did he just say my name seventeen times?”

“Yes.  Well, eight, actually.”

Ray pinched the bridge of his nose, not sure whether to laugh or break something.

“What is it, Fraser?” he asked softly, like maybe if he kept his eyes down he’d actually hear Fraser’s voice answering him.

But the voice that answered after a short pause was Fiona’s, of course.

“He says you should try to avoid complications like the ones that happened the day you met.”

Ray opened his mouth to retort, then realized this was not Fraser being obscure to jerk his chain, this was Fraser sending him a message that wasn’t for Fiona’s ears.  The day he met Fraser had been one long mash-up of _complications_ , all right, but he would bet Fraser wasn’t warning him about his car catching on fire or Fiona trying to measure his nose (though she _was_ Fraser’s kid, so maybe he shouldn’t rule out that possibility).  On the other hand, pretty much the first thing that had happened the day Fraser walked into his life was the Vecchios’ house had gotten arsonized.  By someone with a grudge against Fraser.

_Okay, stay away from Frannie’s house.  Keep Vecchio and his family out of this.  Check._

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, thinking about the implications.  Number one: he’d better do some more careful looking into whether that dead body maybe wasn’t really Victoria Metcalf’s after all, because who else would Fraser be warning him about in this situation?  And number two. . .

_Yeah, great, protect Vecchio.  Who does that leave to step in front of the bullet?  Thank you kindly for volunteering, Ray._

He couldn’t really be pissed, though.  He was the guy on duty.  He was the guy Fraser trusted to look after his kid and to save the day, and goddammit, it was years too late to start saying No to Fraser and his unrealistic expectations.

“Yeah, you know what?” he told Fiona.  “Maybe I’d better keep an eye on you myself.  If there’s going to be some kind of mayhem, I don’t want a bunch of kids caught in the cross-fire.  You can bunk at my place.  You had dinner?”

Fiona shook her head.

“All right, we’ll take care of that when we get there.  C’mon, get your bag, let’s get rolling.  You too, Fraser,” he added.  “If you’re, um, still here.  Join the party.”

“He says to thank you for your hospitality.  I think he means for him, but…thank you.”  Fiona looked up at him seriously.

“No problem, kid.”  He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile.  Maybe she was weirdly calm and grown-up, but at the end of the day, she was just a kid going through some pretty tough and freaky shit.  Even if she did have the ghost of Benton Fraser looking out for her.

He shook his head.  This was definitely protective custody Fraser-style.  His superiors and DCFS would both have his ass in a sling if they found out he was taking an undocumented, underage, probably-orphan-but-maybe-not girl home with him.  But they’d done that kind of thing often enough in the old days, him and Fraser, and not always using the “asylum in Canada” excuse, either.  And he couldn’t take Fiona to Frannie’s or to child services right now, so what other option was there?

 _Besides, this isn’t just some random kid off the street.  She’s family, or the next thing to it.  And damned if I’m going to let Cunningham_ or _Metcalf get their hands on her.  Over my dead body, Fraser._

“What happened the day you and Constable Fraser met?” asked Fiona as Ray locked his office door behind him.

“Oh, all kinds of stuff.  Fraser fed me window putty, I got shot, we ended up in Lake Michigan in a burning car with a bunch of crates full of rubber ducks.”  She didn’t need to hear about him covering for Ray Vecchio, or performance artists going after Fraser, for that matter.  “Trust me, _complicated_ don’t even start to cover it.”


	4. Chapter 4

“Okay, kid, here we are,” said Lieutenant Kowalski, opening the apartment door and waving Fiona inside.  “Welcome to Kowalski’s bed and breakfast.  Reasonable rates, great view of the alley, guaranteed roach-free.”

His apartment was about the size of the cabin where Fiona and her mother lived— _used to live._  But unlike her neat home, with a place for everything and everything in its place, this apartment was full of _stuff,_ jammed onto shelves, spilling over tabletops, strewn on the floor around the couch _._   The place wasn’t _dirty,_ though: no food lying out, no sign of vermin, no smell of rot or mold.  Just the bitter scent of the city air, and that funny unsweet-smoke odor that she’d noticed in his office and coming from his clothes, which she’d decided must be from cigarettes, though she hadn’t yet seen him smoke one.  The apartment was nice enough; it was just messy and too small to hold all the Lieutenant’s belongings neatly even if he’d tidied them all up.

He seemed kind of embarrassed as he bustled around the living room, picking up stray objects and stacking them in piles or shoving them in corners.  “Don’t look too close, okay?  I’d known I was having company, I’d’ve cleaned up.  But seriously, I did mean that about the roaches, you’re not going to trip over anything gross.  And hey, you don’t have to worry about messing anything up, right?  Just hang out, make yourself comfortable.”

Fiona looked around the room, looking at specific items so her eyes wouldn’t track her mother, who was prowling around examining coffee mugs and CD cases and framed photographs as though she were picking over dubious vegetables to find something worth buying.  Fiona stared down at a pair of turtles munching a lettuce leaf in their glass tank, but she could still tell exactly where her mother was.  She felt like the air was pressing in around her, thick and electric and _waiting_ , like a thunderstorm was moving in—except she didn’t think it was the weather making her feel that way.

Lieutenant Kowalski kept talking as he moved through the little kitchen area, rattling dishes and opening and shutting cupboards.  Something about dinner, and Fiona knew she should be paying attention, trying to pick up any clues she could from him.  But it was too hard to concentrate, with that storm-pressure just hanging there, waiting.

 _When you have an unpleasant task ahead of you, it’s usually best to get it over with as soon as possible_ , she reminded herself.  She remembered the first time Santa—Constable Fraser—had given her that advice.  She’d tried to fix dinner by herself, as a surprise for her mother, but had ended up spoiling half the groceries, covering the walls with soot, and scorching the ceiling.  She’d been afraid to face her mother then, too.  It hadn’t been so bad, though.  Her mother had lectured her about not doing anything involving fire by herself until she was older, but she’d also hugged Fiona’s tears away and told her that it was good to learn things and be independent, independence was very important in life, and then they’d scrubbed the kitchen together.

“. . .Oh, and the bathroom’s over here,” said Lieutenant Kowalski, opening a door. 

Fiona’s mother drifted over to stand really close to him, practically hugging him.  She looked up into his face, then crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue at him.  Fiona had to put her hand over her mouth to smother her laughter.  Lieutenant Kowalski was already moving towards a second door (he would have walked right through Fiona’s mother if she hadn’t backed up into the bathroom), but he looked over his shoulder curiously.  Fiona hastily coughed into her hand.

“Could I maybe take a shower?” she asked.

“Sure, help yourself.  Let me get you some towels.  You can use whatever you find in there, soap, shampoo.”  He disappeared through the second door, which seemed to lead to his bedroom.  From what Fiona could see through the open door, it was even messier than the living room, with clothes all over the floor.

“Take your time,” he said, popping his head around the door and handing her a pile of towels.  “I’ll order us some dinner and, uh, maybe clean things up a little.  You ever had a real Chicago-style pizza?”

Fiona shook her head and said, politely, “That sounds nice.”

“Nice ain’t the half of it.  You’ll see.”  He flashed her a grin.  She smiled back tentatively before retreating into the bathroom and locking the door behind her.

It was even smaller than their bathroom at home, which was at least big enough to hold a bathtub.  Here, there was barely room for the toilet, the sink, a tiny shower, Fiona, _and_ her mother.  And her mother seemed to be taking up what space there was; Fiona was only a few inches shorter, but right now her mother towered over her, forcing her back against the shower curtain.

“Turn the water on,” said her mother.  “You don’t want your friend the policeman to hear you.”

Fiona did as she was told, even though it was a waste of water.  She wondered how on earth people who live in a city ever had private conversations; it seemed like there was always someone around to see or hear everything you did.

She’d seen her mother angry before, of course.  She lost her temper sometimes, flares of anger that didn’t last long.  There was the cold, scary anger, too: the burning eyes and too-calm voice that Fiona had only seen a few times in her life.  Since her mother had. . .become a ghost. . .the cold anger had surfaced more often, usually when she talked about Constable Fraser.  But Fiona had never been the target herself. 

“Tell me, Fiona,” said her mother in a voice like a knife through nylon. 

Fiona knew that it would only make things worse to pretend she didn’t know what her mother was asking.

“I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone, not even you,” she said.

Something fierce flashed across her mother’s face, quickly replaced by a look of disgust.  “Well, apparently I’m not the _first_ person you told,” she said.  “Now that I’ve found out from a _stranger_ , you might as well tell me the whole thing, don’t you think?”

“Constable Fraser is, um, he appears to me sometimes.  Like you do.  But I didn’t know who he was, not until we saw those photographs.”

“Really.”  Her mother reached out to take Fiona’s chin and turn her face up to look into her eyes.  Fiona flinched in shock at the touch.  Her mother hadn’t touched her before, not since she’d been like this ( _dead_ ), and Santa never had, either, in all the years she’d known him.  She hadn’t thought they could. 

Her mother’s eyes softened for a moment, but when she spoke again her voice was all steel.  “You had no idea who he was, but you trusted him so much you were willing to lie to me, for him?  You trusted him more than you trusted me?”

“No,” protested Fiona, because that wasn't how it had been, not in the beginning.  Not until. . .the quest.  Not until she'd gone looking for the father whose name her mother had only told her after she was— _Dead.  I have to be able to say it; so I have to be able to think it.  My mother’s dead.  Only not dead-dead, not gone-and-never-coming-back.  I’m lucky.  Most people, when their parents die, they never see them again.  I should count my blessings._

She had lost track of what she was trying to say, and her mother was still waiting with the patience of a cat waiting to pounce, and she nearly explained that she was only six when she promised not to tell, six and afraid that Mommy would think she was telling lies.  And the truth was, she _did_ trust Constable Fraser, much more than she should have trusted any stranger (even one who could appear and disappear like magic and whose smile was so warm and patient).  It didn’t mean that she _didn’t_ trust her mother, she _did_ , but looking into her mother’s fire-under-ice eyes, she didn’t think her mother would believe that.  And. . . _Victoria Metcalf.  Robbery, arson, murder.  Lies._

“I promised,” she said.  “He asked me not to tell anyone and I promised I wouldn’t.”

Strangely, that made her mother smile, although it seemed like she was only smiling with her mouth, not her whole face.

“Of course he did,” she murmured.  “He’s never been very comfortable with truth, after all.  It’s not always such a good friend to him.  He probably wanted you to like him and trust him, and you might not have been so eager to do that if you’d known the truth, would you?  That your father couldn’t even be bothered to ask after you while he was alive?”

“But you—didn’t you always say. . . ?”  Fiona struggled to remember what her mother had actually told her, when she was little and asked about her father, as opposed to the conclusions she’d jumped to.

“What did I say, sweetheart?”

“That. . .I thought you didn’t _want_ him—my father—to find us.  I thought we were hiding from him.”

“We were,” said her mother.  “I was afraid he’d come after us, but it seems I was just being. . .scared.  The Benton Fraser I knew was. . .a hunter.  When he was on the trail, he wouldn’t quit until he won.  If he’d wanted us. . .”  She shook her head, then shrugged as if it weren’t important, looking off over Fiona’s head.  “You saw his service record; he was never stationed in Canada during your lifetime.  You ask your policeman how many times Fraser even visited Canada while he was living here.  He never looked for us.”

“But then why did he come find me after. . . ?”

“Well, that’s a very interesting question, now isn’t it?  Why would he want to talk to you only when he could do it without anyone else knowing—especially once he made sure you were afraid to tell anyone?”

“I wasn’t _afraid_ , I gave my _word._ ”

Her mother shook her head with a sad little smile.  “I know, sweetheart.  It’s not your fault.  How could you know?  But he got what he wanted, didn’t he?”

Fiona bit her lip, feeling the stupid tears threaten again, even though she was much too old to cry.  Everything her mother said was true: Constable Fraser _hadn’t_ looked for them, and he hadn’t told her who he was, just made friends with her when she was by herself and no one could see, and then told her never to tell her mother about him.  And even now, when she was old enough not to do dumb stuff, and her mother was dead _too,_ and she’d _asked_ him if she could tell, he _still_ didn’t want her mother to know about him, and he still didn’t want to tell her anything about anything important.  At least her mother had finally told her her father’s name and where to look for him.  ( _Robbery.  Arson.  Murder.)_

“Why didn’t you tell me your real name?”  Fiona blurted out.

Her mother’s face grew sadder.  “It wasn’t my name any more,” she said.  “I had to change it, to make us harder to find.  I really am Ann Paulsen, I have been for as long as you’ve been alive.  And your name has always truly been Fiona Paulsen.  You’re the same person you always were, and so am I.”

“But I—“  Fiona bit her tongue.  _I don’t know who that is, anymore._   She couldn’t say that, it would make her mother angry again.  Angrier.  “Lieutenant Kowalski’s going to try to catch the people who—who—killed you.  He called the RCMP about it.  I didn’t hear very much and he didn’t tell me everything they said, but it sounded like they think maybe someone named Cunningham did it and he’s going to help them look for him.”

“Is he?  How generous of him.” Fiona’s mother glanced around the tiny bathroom.  “You got him to bring you home with him?”

Fiona nodded.  “I was afraid he’d lock me up, but he. . .he wanted to be nice to me, I guess.  I told him I was afraid bad men were after me, and I think he believed it.  He wants to protect me.”

“He wants to keep an eye on you,” said her mother.  “You scared him, earlier.  He wants to make sure you don’t have a chance to find out any information he doesn’t want you to hear, or talk to anyone he doesn’t approve of.  Remember, he’s got friends to protect, people that matter to him a lot more than you do.  The closer he keeps you, the better he can control you.”

Fiona remembered the sick look on Lieutenant Kowalski’s face when she talked about police officers covering up their crimes.  And how he’d changed his mind about what to do with her when Constable Fraser told him. . .whatever that thing he’d had her say about meeting each other had meant.  She bit her lip.

“I know it’s hard,” said her mother.  “He’s being nice to you, he’s acting like he likes you, so you’ll trust him and do as he says.  But you can play that game, too.  You’ve already got him to let you into his home.”  She reached into the shower and brought out a cake of smelly greenish soap.  Water dripped from it, though her arm stayed dry.   She weighed the soap in one hand, as if considering the distance she could throw it.

“If you’re careful, you can learn a lot from him.  Just remember, he’s going to be telling you what he wants you to know.  It won’t all be true, and even when he thinks he’s telling the truth. . .well, truth is a very slippery thing.”

She clapped her hands together; the cake of soap shot into the air.  Fiona grabbed it before it hit the floor, banging her elbow against the sink in the process.

“He’s—he was Constable Fraser’s friend,” said Fiona.  “He really liked him.”

Her mother smiled.  “Then he’ll like you.”

“Mom?  This man named Cunningham.  Was it him?”

“Oh, sweetie.”  Her mother put out a hand like she was going to stroke Fiona’s hair, then let it fall.  “It’s not important who pulled the trigger.  All that matters is who ruined our lives and put us on the path that led there.  Benton Fraser.  And Ray Vecchio.”

 

                        *                                    *                                    *

 

Ray fidgeted around the living room, having run out of things to straighten up (or, at least, shove out of sight).  He’d gotten the bedroom presentable, changed the sheets and stuffed all the dirty laundry into the hamper and the other random crap under the bed.  He’d emptied the ashtrays and tried to air the room out a little, feeling guilty about the cigarette-stink he couldn’t smell himself but knew was there.  (Fiona hadn’t said anything, of course, but Fraser had never said anything when he’d been around smokers, not that Ray had been a smoker when Fraser was around, because Vecchio hadn’t been, and then he wasn’t about to _start_ again with Fraser around all the time.  Besides: kids, cigarettes, bad combination, and really, it was time Ray thought about quitting again, anyway.) 

The pizza had arrived and was probably getting cold, but the kid was still locked in the bathroom.  The water was running, but Ray suspected she wasn’t just taking the world’s longest shower.  He’d heard her voice, earlier on, not quite all the way drowned out by the splashing.  Fighting with Fraser or talking to herself, he didn’t know; he couldn’t make out the words, but she’d sounded like she was losing it, or close to.

Not that he could blame her for that.  Whatever the hell was going on, Fiona had to be having a pretty shitty time of it.  If her story was true, she’d just lost her mom, then trekked across God knew how much of Canada and got herself to Chicago by herself, only to find out that her mom had been a nasty piece of work who’d lied to her all her life.  If Fiona was lying, Ray wasn’t clear her situation was all that much better, under the thumb of a psycho bitch who was willing to use her own kid to. . .do whatever piece of no-good business she was planning to do.

He chewed his lip, rubbing his neck to try to get rid of some of the tension. 

 _She didn’t know._   Yeah, that was the thing that was nagging at him.  The way Fiona had reacted to seeing those pictures of Victoria Metcalf, and then reading all that stuff in the report. . .Her surprise and distress hadn’t been faked, he’d swear. 

_She didn’t know any of that shit.  Well, okay, fine, no reason Mom would have told her about the skeletons in her closet.  Not really bedtime-story material.  But if Victoria’s alive and Fiona’s working with her, then it shouldn’t surprise her to learn that her mom is a sneaky liar._

_Of course, it’s a big jump from sneaky lies to robbery, arson and murder.  Not to mention framing your lover six ways to Sunday._

When the bathroom door did finally open, he nearly jumped out of his skin.  With her wet hair hanging around her pale face, and her round blue eyes fringed with wet, dark lashes, Fiona looked even younger.  It was pretty obvious she’d been crying, but she was under control now.

“Hey,” he said.  “You hungry?  Pizza’s here.”

“Thank you,” she said, and that was a tone he’d heard out of Fraser a time or two, when someone had hurt him bad enough that he couldn’t quite keep up the calm-and-competent-Mountie routine. 

 _She’s just a kid,_ he reminded himself.  _A kid who’s having a hell of a week and is now stuck with some strange, grouchy old cop for a babysitter._

“Tell you what,” he said, picking up the pizza box.  “I could get out the crystal goblets and cloth napkins, but it’d be more fun to have a picnic, don’t you think?  Like a campout, almost.  We can’t light a fire, obviously, but. . .here, hang on a sec.” 

He handed her the pizza and rummaged through cabinets until he came up with a dusty box of fat candles.  They were supposedly for emergencies—Fraser had made him buy them—but even during a blackout, he’d never yet had any call to light them.  He grabbed some plates and napkins and a couple of mugs and herded Fiona out into the living room, where he shoved the coffee table out of the way by standing with his shins against it and shuffling forward as hard as he could.  He probably looked like some kind of cartoon penguin, but he managed to move the table without dropping any of the stuff he was carrying, plus it got Fiona to crack a smile, so that was something.

He’d ordered a deep-dish pizza with spinach and broccoli and whatnot, the kind Fraser had always liked.  Apparently Fiona liked it too, or maybe she was just real hungry, because she chowed down enthusiastically, only slowed down by the fact that she was using a fork and knife to cut the pizza into dainty bites that she managed to eat from the plate in her lap without getting sauce or crumbs anywhere they didn’t belong.  At least she was kid-like enough to drink Coke, which was the only beverage Ray had in the house besides water and a couple of orphaned bottles of beer.

The ring of candles was nothing at all like a campfire, but they were pretty, and with the lights off and the candles burning, his apartment almost seemed like a different place, a little bit outside the real world.  In that, it reminded him a lot of the campfires he’d shared with Fraser.

“It’s too bad we don’t have any marshmallows to roast,” he told Fiona, who was staring into the little wavering flames.  “You know, Fraser and I used to go camping in the park sometimes, in summer.  His idea, the nut.  He needed open spaces and nature and all that stuff, you know?  So when the city started getting to him, he’d go sit out under the trees all night.  We’d build a fire, toast some marshmallows, tell stupid campfire stories and stuff.  You do a lot of camping, up North?”

“Yes,” said Fiona.  “My—my mother didn’t care for camping, but we always had a tent and gear, and when I got old enough, she let me camp out overnight sometimes.”

“What, in the backyard?”

“No, in the woods.  Our house is in the woods and there are some good campsites not too far away.”

“You spend a lot of time hanging out in the woods, then?” he asked.  _And where exactly were those woods, by the way?_

“Yes.”  Fiona smiled a little.

“By yourself?  Or with friends, or, I don’t know, you got a Girl Scout troop up where you live?”

“You mean Girl Guides?” Fiona asked, wrinkling her nose.  “No, we don’t—we didn’t have any near neighbors, and we didn’t go into town very much.  There aren’t a lot of kids there anyway.  I learned about woods survival by myself.  Well. . .from Constable Fraser.”

“You went camping with Fraser?” asked Ray.

“Well. . .sort of.  Sometimes when I went out to the woods, he would be there.  Or he’d appear when I was in the middle of doing something.  I used to think of him as. . .”  She ducked her head, looking embarrassed.  “Some kind of woods spirit.”

Ray smiled at that idea.  “Not totally wrong.  Frase always—that was where he really belonged, in some ways.  Out in the woods, or on the ice.  He liked people, and they liked him, but it was like. . .Well, I mostly knew him in Chicago, which was really not the kind of place where he felt at home.”

Fiona nodded.  “It’s so.  . .noisy.  And crowded.  And smelly.  And it seems like everybody’s yelling all the time, even when they’re being nice.”

Ray looked at her, imagining what it would have been like for Fraser, dropped here alone to fend for himself in a big scary strange place right after losing his dad, if he’d been just a kid instead of an employed and freakishly competent adult. 

 _Not to mention, whatever she went through to get here. . .and how the hell_ did _she get here, a kid on her own with no passport?_

“I grew up here,” he told her.  “Never lived anywhere else, so I’m used to it.  But I went up to Canada with Fraser a couple times, the real wilderness part of Canada, and boy, that was. . .different.  Kind of freaky at first, all that space and quiet and darkness, but after I was there for a while, it kind of, I don’t know, got inside me.  Gave me a little taste of what it might be like to live this whole completely different life, you know?”

“You went camping with Constable Fraser for real?” asked Fiona.

“Yep.  The first time, we went on a six-week dogsled trek up by the Arctic Circle, way up North.  Looking for the remains of the Franklin expedition.  You know about those guys?  Went looking for a channel to navigate, went missing, all died up there.”

“They set out from England in 1845 and were last seen by Europeans in August of 1845, as they prepared to cross Lancaster Sound,” said Fiona.  “There were any number of English expeditions, and even some American ones, in the 1840s and 50s, that went looking for the explorers or evidence of what happened to them.  In 1854 and 1855, surveyors from the Hudson’s Bay Company met some Inuit who told them about a band of white men who had starved to death, and showed them artifacts that had belonged to the Franklin expedition.  In 1859 a cairn was found with messages from Franklin’s ship captains.  The ships had been icebound for a year and a half, and Franklin had died in 1847, and the survivors tried to walk overland to Black River, but they didn’t make it.  There have been modern expeditions to excavate various sites where bodies and relics have been found, and do forensic analysis on the remains, but no one has ever been able to find the ships.”

“Wow, you’re a regular walking textbook, ain’t you?” Kowalski grinned at her.  _Really, that shouldn’t be surprising, she’s Fraser’s kid.  Guess those librarian genes are strong._  

“It’s one of the enduring myths that informs the Canadian cultural consciousness,” said Fiona matter-of-factly.  Which Ray knew; he could practically recite Fraser’s lecture about Victorian colonialism, and the symbolism of the North, and that lady who wrote about how Canadians think the wilderness is spooky and exotic and basically out to get them, and how people love a good tragedy, especially if it’s also a mystery, and the way the guy who wrote that Franklin song died rescuing people from a burning plane.

“You know that song?” he asked.  “The one about the hand of Franklin?”

“ _Oh for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage…”_ Fiona sang tentatively.

“Yeah.”  Ray nodded encouragingly.  “ _To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea…”_

 _“Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage  
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea,_ ”

they sang together.  Fiona had a sweet, clear voice once she relaxed into it.

“Go on, I could never remember the verses,” said Ray.  Which wasn’t true, the damn song was carved in his memory, but it was the kind of lie that his mom and probably even Fraser would have approved of.

 _“Westward from the Davis Strait 'tis there 'twas said to lie_  
_The sea route to the Orient for which so many died;_  
_Seeking gold and glory, leaving weathered, broken bones_  
_And a long-forgotten lonely cairn of stones.”_  

Singing, Fiona smiled: a regular kid-caught-up-in-what-she’s-doing-and-having-fun kind of smile that broke Ray’s heart a little because it was the first time he’d seen it on her face.

Ray joined her on the chorus.  _“Ah, for just one time, I would take the Northwest Passage…”_

For a second, he could swear he heard a third voice singing along: a man’s voice, deeper than his own, painfully familiar.  Ray stumbled over the words, straining to hear the echo, but it was gone, or only in his imagination.

After they’d finished the last chorus, he put on a smile for Fiona and told her, “Hey, that was pretty good.  I guess they teach you about all that Franklin stuff in school in Canada?”

“I don’t know.  My mother taught me at home.  And I read a lot of books, of course.  The nearest school was too far away.”  She shrugged.  “And. . .”

“And your mom wanted to keep a low profile, so you guys didn’t do much stuff with other people?  That about it?”

Fiona nodded.  “We did go to town sometimes, there are people we know there.  I spend a lot of time at the library, Mrs. Grogan—she’s the librarian—she picks out books she thinks I should read, and sometimes she gives me lessons.  So does Mr. Kensey.  He used to be a science teacher, before he retired and moved to—to the country.  And the library computer has internet, Mrs. Grogan lets me use it when I’m there.”

“Yeah, I guess there’s a lot more options now than when I was a kid.  Plus, you had Fraser, who’s like, a walking encyclopedia.  I bet he taught you all kinds of random stuff, not just woods survival.  Like that song, for one thing, right?”

“Yes.  Only now I don’t know why.”

“He probably wanted to help you learn stuff?” suggested Ray.

Fiona rolled her eyes at him just like a pre-teen girl, which Ray wouldn’t have bet she knew how to do.

“No, seriously,” he said.  “I mean, he was—is?—like that.  He liked to teach people stuff, help them out.  Help them. . .”  He waved his fork, trying to find the right words.  “Be what they needed to be.  More than they thought they could be, better, sometimes.”

Fiona chewed her lip, which Ray figured meant she was at least listening, so he pressed on.

“See, and this is why your story about Fraser being dirty is. . .a fairy tale.  He saw that in everyone, the best they could be, and then he wanted everyone to _be_ like that.  Including himself.  And he had this way of making you want to not disappoint him by coming up short, you know?  Of course, it didn’t work on everyone.  Sometimes it made people want to kill him.”

_Red and white and grey and too many guys with guns and Ray firing, sight and squeeze, hands hands hands, aim for the hands, make him proud. . ._

He picked up one of the candles and poked at it with his fork until the wax ran down the side and puddled on his hand, not really hot after the first contact, just warm.

Fiona must have been thinking along the same lines, because she asked, quietly, “How did Constable Fraser die?  I mean, I read his service record, but. . .”

“Doing something dumb.”  The words fell out of his mouth before he could stop them.  Fiona blinked at him in surprise.  Ray shook his head and spread out his palms in. . .apology, or something, he wasn’t even sure.

“He got into a stand-off with a bunch of thugs.  They had guns.  He didn’t, and anyway, there were too many of them for some kind of OK Corral stunt.”  He poked at the candle some more, trying to keep the images out of his head.  “He didn’t wait for backup, not even for me.  He was always doing that kind of crazy sh—stuff, and it usually worked, don’t ask me how, but that time. . .it didn’t.”  He shrugged.  “They gunned him down.  Time the rest of us got on the scene, it was too late.” 

“Did you arrest them, at least?” asked Fiona in a subdued voice.

“Yeah.”  Ray sighed and rubbed his free hand over his face.  “Fraser got what he wanted, I guess.  Held ‘em up long enough for the rest of the team to get into position.  We brought ‘em in, in the end.  Wasn’t worth it, though.”

“You really cared about him a lot, didn’t you?”

“Best friend I ever had,” said Ray.  “And he was my partner, which is closer than friends in some ways.  A partnership like we had, it’s like—“

“-- _a marriage,”_ came the echo of a voice saying the words with him.  He was looking at Fiona; her mouth hadn’t moved, and besides, that wasn’t a girl’s voice.

“Fiona?” Ray asked.  “Is—is he here?”

“Yes.  He’s sitting over there.”  She pointed across the circle of candles.  Ray stared, but couldn’t see anything but bare floor and an empty armchair.  “How did you know?”

“I think I. . .thought I heard his voice, for a second there.  And before. . .was he singing with us?”

Fiona nodded.

“Huh.”  He squinted, rubbed his eyes, did all the dumb things people do in movies when they can’t believe their eyes, but still: just the same old furniture.

Fiona looked over at the empty space.

“What’s he saying?” asked Ray.

“Nothing.  He’s just looking at you.”  She paused, then added, “Now he says it’s odd hearing himself described to his face like this.  Sorry,” she told the air.

“Yeah, sorry, buddy, don’t mean to talk about you like you’re not there,” said Ray in the direction Fiona was looking.  “I, uh, I don’t know what the, like, social rules are for having a conversation with someone you can’t see or hear.”

“He says he doesn’t know the etiquette either.  He always tried to avoid having it come up.”

Ray smiled.  “Yeah, he went to a lot of trouble to keep people from figuring out his dad was, uh, visiting him, back in the day.  Didn’t you?” he added to the invisible Fraser, then told Fiona, “I didn’t even know about it until after—until later.”

 _Shit._   He didn’t really want to get into the whole thing about Fraser’s dad hanging around for a while and then moving on to the afterlife for real.  Fiona might be having some sort of weird issue with Fraser at the moment—and Ray really needed to find out what was up with that—but she was just getting used to the idea of thinking of him as her dad, and he seemed to be the closest thing to a father she’d ever had.  The last thing she needed right now was extra anxiety about whether he was suddenly going to abandon her.  Ray didn’t feel like thinking too hard about it himself, either.

Fortunately, it seemed like Fraser had fielded that ball; at least, Fiona seemed to be listening to some kind of extended speech from him.

“In your _closet?_ ” she asked.  Another pause.

“Hey, can you let me in on the gossip, here?” said Ray, trying not to sound like either an impatient parent or a whiny little brother.

“Sorry,” she said.  “He says when his father used to. . .visit, like he does, that he eventually started living in his—Constable Fraser’s—closet.  And that he used to appear when Constable Fraser was in the middle of conversation with his boss or stuff like that, and it was embarrassing because if he talked to his dad then people would think he was crazy.”

“Yeah, it was a little weird sometimes, he’d say something that made no sense with what was going on.  Of course, Fraser was pretty much a freak and no one knew what he was talking about half the time, anyway.”  Ray flashed a grin in the direction of the armchair.  “So it kind of came across as part of the general weirdness.  So, Fraser, you any more polite to Fiona than your dad was to you?”

“He says he tries not to put me in awkward positions by virtue of his presence,” said Fiona, in that slightly creepy quoting-Fraser-verbatim manner, then added, “He’s never—before I left home, I only ever saw him in the woods.  Never in front of people.”

“Not even your mom?” asked Ray, trying to keep his voice casual.

“No.”  The shields went up anyway; Fiona’s upset-but-not-showing-it blank-face was a dead ringer for Fraser’s. 

 _Damn._  

Ray  opened his mouth to say something, not sure if he ought to be trying to get back to the comfortable mood they’d had going a second ago or pushing Fiona about her mother to see if she’d spill something useful.  But somehow he got the feeling Fraser was talking.  Maybe he was just picking it up from Fiona’s body language: she was staring at the candles in a way that looked like she was pretending not to listen to Fraser, though it also could have just meant she was refusing to talk to Ray.  But as he listened, holding his breath, he thought he could make out the rise and fall of speech, too faint and garbled for the sense of the words to come through, but the rhythm and tone recognizably speech and recognizably Fraser.  And then, like a passing snatch from a radio station at the edge of receiving range: “ _…learn from my father’s mistakes…_ ”

Ray looked at Fiona, who was frowning at the candles.

“What did he say?” he asked, and then, when she didn’t respond, “Something about mistakes?”

“He said his father was a great man but he also made some mistakes and that he’s tried to learn from his father’s mistakes as well as his example.”  Fiona’s tone was skeptical.  After a pause, she added.  “And he had some opportunities his father never got and you should tell me about Maggie.  I don’t know why he can’t just tell me about Maggie himself.”

“Maybe ‘cause you told him not to tell you anything?” suggested Ray, letting a hint of a smile show.  “Or maybe he’s just being polite.  He can hear me; I can’t hear him.”

Fiona still looked dubious, but she shrugged.  “Okay, who’s Maggie?”

“Maggie’s Fraser’s sister,” said Ray.  “So, your aunt.” 

_And how come Maggie doesn’t need protecting like Vecchio does?  You think someone looking for revenge on you wouldn’t go after her, Fraser?  Well, we’ll just make sure not to mention her last name or location and hope Fraser knows what he’s doing, shall we?_

“He has a sister?”  Fiona looked startled and yeah, a lot more interested all of a sudden.  “There was nothing about that anywhere I looked.”

“Well, half-sister, see?  Fraser’s dad and Maggie’s mom. . .dated, for a while, after Fraser’s mom died.  It didn’t work out, I guess, and Fraser’s dad never knew about Maggie being born.  Not until she was grown up, and he was, uh, dead, and Maggie and Fraser happened to run into each other.”

“Where?” asked Fiona.

“That’s not important,” said Ray, borrowing a trick that always used to work for Fraser.  “The point, or at least I think what Fraser’s point probably is, is that Maggie was, maybe not a mistake, but for sure a missed opportunity for his dad.  He didn’t have a chance to be around when she was growing up or, you know, be a dad to her.”

Not that Fraser’s dad necessarily would have done much if he _had_ known, given how little time he’d apparently spent with the son he did know about, but Ray was pretty sure he knew what moral Fraser was going for, here.

Fiona—not stupid, not by a long shot—obviously got it, too.  Crossing her arms and chewing her lower lip, she looked first at Ray, then at the empty place where Fraser was, then down at the flames again.  After several moments of silence, she suddenly burst out:

“But you never _looked_ for us!”

Ray peered at the place where he still couldn’t make out Fraser, then at Fiona, but if Fraser was talking, Ray couldn’t tell.  And maybe Fraser wasn’t, because after a while Fiona turned to Ray and said:

“He _didn’t._ ”

Why Fraser wasn’t answering for himself, Ray didn’t know, but it was apparently Ray’s turn to take point, so he looked thoughtfully at Fiona and asked, “How do you know?”

“I saw his service record.  He was never stationed in Canada after I was born.  He lived here that whole time.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Ray confirmed.

“You worked with him that whole time, right?  And were friends and everything?”

“Yep.”

“So you know how much time he spent in Canada while he was living here, right?” Fiona asked.  “Did he ever visit?”

“Sometimes.  Not that often.  That’s something the Consulate probably has on file, by the way, if I could talk them into looking it up for me.  So you don’t got to take my word for it, and anyway the written records would be more accurate.  But as far as I remember, between the time I met Fraser and our first big trip together, he didn’t leave town at all, except a few times we went somewhere for a case.  Couple of those times, we did end up in Canada, but we were together pretty much the whole time, and there wasn’t a lot of downtime.”

He closed his eyes, sifting through memories, trying to call up the relevant information.  “I told you about the Quest for the hand of Franklin, that was our first big trip to Canada together, in 1999.  We took three more vacations together up there, I guess that would have been in 2000, 2001, 2002.  Different places, but always out in the wilderness somewhere where we didn’t see a soul for ninety percent of the time.  He couldn’t have been doing any kind of detective work then, unless it was reading footprints.  Other than that. . .a handful of cases where we went to Canada, and a couple of times where the Consulate sent him back to the mother ship or whatever, but none of those trips was more than a few days long.” 

“So he couldn’t have been looking for us,” said Fiona, angrily triumphant.

“Well, not in person.  Could’ve done all kinds of investigation by talking to the RCMP on the phone and that kind of thing,” Ray pointed out.  “On the other hand, it sounds like your mom did a pretty good job keeping under the Mounties’ radar.”

 _And maybe Fraser wanted it that way.  Because why_ wasn’t _he looking for her, come to think of it?  What about that always-get-our-man, hunt-you-to-the-ends-of-the-Earth crap?  The woman was a_ murderer _, for Christ’s sake. . .wasn’t she?_

“If he’d wanted to find us, he would have looked for himself,” said Fiona tentatively.

“Probably true.  Especially if he wanted to find you in some way that didn’t involve arresting your mom.” 

And it had always been hard to call when Fraser was going to play rules-lawyer to keep from having to arrest someone he didn’t want to, versus when he was going to get all by-the-book and bring in someone he believed was innocent.  Maybe Fraser had felt like going after Victoria himself would be some kind of conflict of interest, though he sure hadn’t had any guilty feelings about chasing down the guys who’d killed his parents.

 _And why the hell isn’t he just speaking up?_   Ray peered suspiciously at Fiona, but she was looking back at him like she was listening to him; if she was hearing anything else, Ray couldn’t tell by looking at her.

“So he wasn’t looking for us,” Fiona repeated.  “Because he didn’t want to find us.  Me.”

“Well. . .that’s possible,” said Ray.  “But there’s a more obvious explanation.  I’ll bet you anything you like that Fraser didn’t know you existed until he died.”

Fiona opened her mouth, then shut it.  She looked over at invisible-Fraser for a long moment, but either he still wasn’t saying anything, or she wasn’t satisfied with what she heard, because she turned back to Ray and said, sounding almost defiant:

“Can you prove it?”

“Well, prove, I don’t know about that,” said Ray.  “But listen.  I can maybe, _maybe_ imagine Fraser agreeing to give you up and never contact you if there was a court order, or if he honestly thought it was the best thing for you.  I can even imagine him doing that and never mentioning it to me.” 

 _He never mentioned Victoria to me, after all._  

“But your Mr. Oxhead with the razor says Fraser didn’t know about you.  Think about the case file.  Even if you don’t believe it all, it’s pretty clear Chicago police were after your mom, so she must have left town pretty quick before they could catch her.  She wouldn’t have known she was pregnant until two-three months later.  So unless she sent Fraser a letter saying ‘I’m pregnant, here’s my address, come send the cops after me,’ how was he ever supposed to find out about you?"

Fiona stared straight into his eyes for what felt like a really long time, and Ray looked calmly back, another thing he’d picked up from Fraser over the years.  _If you want a wild animal to come to you, you have to keep still and look into its eyes.  Let it smell that you can be trusted.  People are the same way, Ray._   He’d never been totally sold on the smelling part, but that still-quiet eye-contact thing Fraser did worked wonders on people, and Ray had gotten pretty good at it, too.  The trick was, you couldn’t be bullshitting.

Fiona broke eye contact, finally, turning to look across the circle of candles.  “Well?” she asked Fraser.

“ _Ray knows me very well,”_ came Fraser’s voice out of nowhere, clear as a bell.  “ _And he has excellent powers of deduction.  Also, sound instincts.”_

“Is it true?” Fiona pressed.

“ _You made me promise not to tell you anything.  My word is no good anymore.”_

Ignoring the creepiness factor involved in talking to Fraser’s disembodied voice, Ray rapped out: “Well, you didn’t promise not to tell _me_ anything, Fraser.  Is it true?”

_“Of course it’s true, Ray.”_

There was a second’s pause.  Then Fiona jumped to her feet, protesting, “Wait, no, you can’t just—“  She stamped her foot in frustration.  “He _left._   You can’t just say something like that and then leave.”

“Apparently if you’re a ghost, you can,” said Ray.  “Fraser said his dad used to drive him up the wall like that all the time, showing up at really inconvenient times and saying annoying stuff, then disappearing so Fraser couldn’t get the last word in.  I think it’s like a rule about parents: either they’re around when you don’t want them, or they’re not when you do.”

Fiona burst into tears.

“Hey, hey, don’t. . .it’ll be okay.”  Mentally cursing his big mouth, Ray got to his feet and tentatively approached Fiona.  He touched her shoulder; when she didn’t flinch away, he slid his arm around her and pulled her into a loose hug.  She buried her face in his chest, crying silently, her tears soaking into his shirt.

“Hey, I got you, you’re gonna be okay. . .You miss your mom?” he guessed.

“I want to go home.”  Her voice was muffled against his chest.

He let her cry as he babbled soothing nonsense and patted her back awkwardly, wondering what the hell was going to happen to her, long-term.  If her mother was really dead, was there any family Fiona could go to?  She didn’t seem to know about any, but maybe he’d better find out.  If she was really on her own. . .maybe he should contact Maggie, see if she wanted to take in a long-lost niece?  And then on the other hand, if Victoria Metcalf was alive and out there somewhere, Ray was going to have to put her out of commission one way or another, and Fiona would be on her own anyway.

_First things first.  Solve the mystery, stop the bad guys, save the day.  Get the kid to stop crying._

“You know,” he said.  “When my mom and dad sold their house—the house I grew up in—and moved out to Arizona, I felt like. . .I don’t know, like they’d betrayed me, almost.  It was dumb, I hadn’t lived there for years, I was married and had my own place.  Heck, my dad and me weren’t even speaking to each other at the time.  But still, even now, sometimes when things are really bad and I just want to go home. . .that’s the home I mean, in my head.”

Fiona pulled away from him, scrubbing at her face with her shirt.  She sat back down on the floor, so Ray did the same, his bad knee twinging a little.

“Why weren’t you talking to each other?” asked Fiona after a little while.  “You and your dad?”

“He didn’t want me to be a cop,” Ray explained.  “Got real pissed off about it.  I went and signed up for the Academy anyway.  We had a big fight, he said I wasn’t his son any more, I said screw you too. . .”  He shrugged.  “He didn’t really mean it, quite.  Or maybe my mom wouldn’t let him go that far.  But it was a long time before we could talk to each other.”

“Why didn’t he want you to be a police officer?”

“Well. . .at the time I thought it was ‘cause he didn’t think it was high-class enough. Dirty.  He wanted me to go to college, or at least get a job in like a bank or something.  _Make something of myself,_ you know, do better than he did, end up somewhere with lawns and station wagons and kids who go to college.  Which I got why he’d feel that way, I just didn’t agree, although I almost ended up doing it on accident.”

“Why did you want to be a police officer?  That badly?”

“I don’t know, I had some idea about making a difference in people’s lives, maybe being some kind of hero, even.”  He shook his head with a rueful little smile.  “I did want to make something better of myself, just not the way my dad meant it.”

Fiona looked up at him, searchingly, like maybe she was trying to look inside his head.

 _God’s honest truth, kid_ , he thought, wondering if she could read that off his face.

“What about Constable Fraser?” she asked after a while, because yeah, this wasn’t about Ray, not really.

“Why’d he become a Mountie?” he asked, and Fiona nodded.  “Well, you’d have to ask him.  But I know he had kind of the opposite story from mine.  His dad was a Mountie too, an honest-to-goodness hero, legend in his own time, all that good stuff.  And Fraser followed right after him.  I guess when you have a dad like that you pretty much have two choices: either you try to be just like him, or you rebel as hard as you can.”

 _And then, when you find out your dad’s not a saint after all. . ._ The thought took Ray by surprise.  Fraser had talked to him a couple of times about how he’d found out that old Bob Fraser had taken hush-money, and how that had shaken Fraser’s world, although he claimed he’d later come to accept his dad as a flawed-but-still-admirable guy. 

 _Exactly which of your dad’s mistakes are you trying not to repeat, Fraser?_   Ray wondered uncomfortably.

“You think F—Constable Fraser wanted to be a hero?” asked Fiona.

“I think he wanted to help people and make the world better,” said Ray.  “Maintain the right.  I think being a hero was the only way he knew how to do that.”

“Because of his father?”

“Maybe.  Although, might just be Fraser was born to it.  I mean, I’m sure he worked real hard to get as good at it as he was, don’t get me wrong.  But I could imagine another universe where I’m, I don’t know, a mechanic or a rock star or an airplane pilot or something.  But I think Fraser might be a cop in all of the universes.”

Fiona chewed on her lower lip for a moment.  “Why couldn’t he be a rock star or an airplane pilot?”

Ray snorted.  “Well, I’m pretty sure if he wanted to be an airplane pilot, he could do it, but my point is, he wouldn’t want to.  Rock star, on the other hand, now there’s one of the top ten least likely jobs in the world for Fraser.  Man can sing just fine and play guitar too, for that matter, but he’s got all the stage presence of a dead fish.  Plus, I just can’t see Fraser lasting long in a job that involves spitting on your fans.”

Fiona’s eyes went wide, then she frowned.  “Rock stars don’t really do that, do they?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely.  I’ll have you know I been spat on by Alice Cooper, back in the day.”

Fiona pulled a face, but she looked like she thought that was a little funny, too.

“I mean, can you imagine Fraser up there going ‘Thank you kindly for your attention, motherfuckers’?”

Fiona actually giggled at that.

“Hello Tuktoyuktuk!”  Ray scrambled to his feet and addressed the invisible screaming crowd.  “Hold on to your caribou—we’re going to rock you and sock you and blow your fucking minds and also ritually exprec—expect—“

“Expectorate?” offered Fiona.

“Expectorate.  Damn straight.  We’re gonna expectorate the fuck out of you.” 

His mother would wash his mouth out with soap for throwing around this kind of language in front of a girl Fiona’s age, and Fraser might get prissy about it too, but Fiona had that expression of slightly scandalized delight that kids get when adults conspire to be naughty with them.

Ray tried to pull off an air-guitar rendition of the riff from “School’s Out” while imitating Fraser’s parade-rest-rocking-from-one-foot-to-the-other version of grooving to the tunes, which turned out to be a lot harder than he would have thought, but since the entire point was to look ridiculous, he could hardly go wrong.  It made Fiona laugh, anyway.

Then she suddenly turned her head and looked intently away from him, and Ray realized Fraser must have put in a reappearance.  But before he could get ready to deal with fireworks, Fiona said, with a pout that looked like about eighty-five percent joking, “Go away, we’re having fun without you.”

“Hey, hey, don’t be mean,” Ray teased her.  “Even I have better manners than that.  You can’t kick someone out of your party just ‘cause he has cooties.”

Fiona gave him a confused look.

“Uh, cooties, you know, in elementary school when boys and girls don’t want to touch each other, and. . .”  _Right, born in a barn, raised by wolves._   He pictured Fraser looking at him with a puzzled expression to match Fiona’s, which was actually a pretty funny mental image, the two of them with their heads cocked to the side like that. . . 

“Never mind,” he said.  “The point is, even if he is a big freak, he came all the way from the astral plane or somewhere to join our cookout and the polite thing to do is offer him a seat and a plate and then make fun of him behind his back after he goes home.”

He grinned at her and got a real smile in return.

“We ate all the pizza,” she said.  “And we don’t have any marshmallows.”

“Maybe Fraser brought some,” said Ray.

“He says that’s not something he normally carries with him,” said Fiona after the usual pause.

“Seriously, Frase, you gonna let me down here?  You can find a poisonous bouga toad on five minutes’ notice and you carry a tuning fork as part of your standard equipment, but you showed up to a cookout without marshmallows?”

“He _sincerely apologizes_ for the lack of marshmallows,” Fiona relayed.  “But he says he could sing for his supper—even though there isn’t any and you couldn’t eat it anyway,” she told invisible-Fraser.  “Or he could tell us a campfire story.”

“What, you mean the ghost wants to sit around telling ghost stories?”  Ray snickered helplessly, because it wasn’t that funny, not funny at all really, except that it _was._

Fiona actually reached over and swatted Ray’s knee, surprising the hell out of him.  She was giggling, too, as she said, “ _Now_ who’s being rude?”

“Okay, okay, ghost stories, great idea,” said Ray, holding up his hands in surrender.  “But Fraser don’t get to tell them, ‘cause one, the point is to tell a story, not play Telephone, and B, no offense, buddy, but your campfire stories are really lame.”

“No, they’re not!” Fiona protested. 

Ray blinked at her, surprised to hear her stick up for Fraser like that.  Apparently it surprised her too; her mouth went tight in angry embarrassment for a second, but then she shrugged. 

“I like your stories,” she mumbled.

Ray leaned over and stage-whispered in her ear, “You know what?  I always kind of liked them, too.  Fraser had his own special brand, that’s for sure.”

She glanced up at him and he gave her a wink.

“Tell you what,” he said, getting to his feet.  “You know that one he used to tell about Lou Scagnetti?  Why don’t you tell it to us?  I bet you don’t even need Fraser to prompt you—you probably had it memorized when you were seven, right?”

Fiona shrugged, but she was smiling.

He went and rummaged around in the kitchen drawers until he laid hands on a flashlight, which even had working batteries.  While he was at it, he dug out some M&Ms and poured them into a bowl.  Not exactly marshmallows, but better than nothing.

When he handed Fiona the flashlight, she dutifully lit it up under her chin.  With her black hair and pale skin, the effect was actually kind of creepy: like some kind of death mask floating in the dark.  The story was a lot creepier than he remembered, too, or maybe it was just that Fiona—unlike Fraser—actually knew how to make a story sound scary.  It wasn’t the words; he was barely listening to those.  It was her voice: high and clear like only kids’ voices are, but whispering with the intensity of a grown woman grieving for a lost child.  In the dim light of the candles and the streetlights from outside, it was easy to imagine Fiona as one of those ghosts that keep calling to you until you follow them into a river and drown. 

 _Except_ , he reminded himself firmly, _Apparently actual ghosts look like regular people and follow you around giving you stupid advice and stealing your French fries.  Or teaching you how to build campfires._

“Boy,” he said when Fiona was done, forcing his voice to sound cheerful.  “You sure know how to tell a ghost story.  I don’t know how I’m gonna get to sleep tonight after that.”

Fiona held out the flashlight to him, handle-first, which meant she was lighting herself up with the beam.  In the more diffuse light, she didn’t look like a ghost any more.  She just looked like a kid. . .a kid pretending not to be scared of the dark.

“Maybe you should tell a funny one,” she suggested softly.

“You got it,” he said, but of course, put on the spot like that, he couldn’t think of a single funny story, not even a dirty one. 

He tried to think about funny things that had happened to him—because honestly, some pretty ridiculous things had happened to him over the years, especially back when Fraser was around.  He remembered the two of them sneaking around all over the 2-7 with a shellacked dead body in a wheelchair, which was actually pretty hilarious after the fact, once they’d nailed the guy who did it and Ray was no longer panicking about getting thrown to the wolves in place of the real Ray Vecchio.  He opened his mouth to launch into the story, but then realized that a story with dead bodies in it was not what he was looking for, here, to cheer up a twelve-year-old whose mother had recently been murdered.

A lot of Ray’s best real-life stories involved either murder or attempted murder, he realized—even the funny ones.  That wasn’t so strange: he was a cop, after all.  And it wasn’t that he thought there was anything funny about death, it was just, you start with a dead body with a map tattooed on his chest and you end up shooting through the air with a fire extinguisher strapped to your back.  At least, you did if you worked with Fraser.

She probably didn’t want to hear about Fraser faking his own death, either.  Or about the bounty hunter with the three kids from Hell who. . .  No, nothing funny about either of those stories.  Not right now.

“Okay, I’ve got one,” he said, finally, holding the flashlight in his lap and pointing it up at his face.  “Fraser ever tell you about the time he made me go undercover as a baseball player?”

He heard a faint echo of laughter.

Fiona just shook her head and curled up on the floor with her head on one of the couch pillows, looking up at him expectantly.

“Something funny?” Ray asked.

“He said it was a classic American tale of heroism and triumph,” she said.  “But now he says that he didn’t mean it as a joke.  Either now or then.”

Startled, Ray felt his cheeks flush; he faked a cough, to have an excuse to duck his head.  Fraser had always teased him about the whole baseball game thing, when he mentioned it all, and yeah, okay, Ray had gone overboard with bragging about his home run, but damn it, Fraser had asked the impossible of him and he’d actually done it. . .and somehow, it was nice to hear that Fraser actually had been impressed, or proud of him, or something.

“Well, it all started when Lieutenant Welsh—he was my boss at the time—got a call from his brother who lived up in this Podunk town in East Nowhere. . .”

It was funny how vividly it all came back, when he was telling someone about it.  Ray hammed it up as much as he could, digging up all the goofy details he could remember and making up a few that just sounded good, dramatizing his pathetic attempts at practicing ball with Fraser.  He kept expecting Fraser to cut in with corrections or commentary, but either Fraser wasn’t saying anything or Fiona wasn’t bothering to relay it.  Hell, for all he knew, Fraser had wandered off to rewind his ghostly CDs or whatever he did when he wasn’t hanging around with Fiona.

When he got to the dramatic finale, with the home run and the arrest and the fireworks, he looked over to check Fiona’s reaction and saw that she was curled up with her arms around the pillow and her eyes closed.  She was smiling, though.  She didn’t seem to be quite asleep, maybe halfway, so Ray kept talking, without much plan in his head, just saying whatever little bits and pieces came into his head, like Fraser sneaking files out of the 2-7 by hiding them in his pants, and the time Welsh caught them trying to conspire in the men’s room, and the time they started out guarding that singer chick and Fraser ended up singing backup.  Camping in the park with Fraser telling his dumb ghost stories; camping for real, on the Quest, with Fraser telling stories he’d heard from his Inuit friends about how the world was created.

Finally, Ray’s voice got raspy and the candles had all burned out, and when he turned the flashlight beam on Fiona’s face, she was conked out for real.  So he scooped her up in his arms, real careful, and took her into the bedroom, where he laid her down on his bed and tucked the blanket over her.  He tiptoed out, shutting the door softly behind him.

He’d forgotten to bring out anything to sleep in.  Too late now, and besides, he didn’t need a semi-pubescent girl seeing him in his boxers anyway.  At least he’d put out a blanket and pillow.  He folded himself up on the couch, which was not really long enough for a grown man to sleep on, and squirmed around until he had the blanket more or less covering him.

“Goodnight, Frase,” he whispered to the empty apartment.


	5. Chapter 5

“Turn left here,” said Fiona’s mother, although Fiona could perfectly well read the street sign herself.  _North Octavia Avenue._   

She walked slowly up the street, dragging her feet a little and letting her shoulders slump under the weight of her rucksack.  She thought about rubbing a little dirt on her face, but figured that might be overdoing it; besides, Chicago streets didn’t seem to have _dirt_ so much as _refuse._   She’d left her hair unbrushed, which should make her look a little bedraggled, like she’d been on the road for days.  (Which she _had_ , just not counting yesterday.)

Number 2926 was a three-story house, mostly made of red bricks, with lots of windows and a front porch with funny pillars supporting the upper deck.  The tiny, fenced-in front yard was covered with scrubby patches of grass and a collection of balls and other plastic toys.

When Fiona rang the bell, a pretty woman, supporting a baby against her shoulder, opened the door.

“It’s not Girl Scout cookie time yet,” she said.  “Are you selling magazines or something?  Because I’m sorry, but if I get any more magazine subscriptions, the house is gonna be stacked solid with paper.”

“Good morning, ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you.  I’m looking for Francesca Vecchio,” said Fiona in her most polite talking-to-strange-adults voice.

“Yeah, that’s me,” replied the woman.  “Who are you, honey?”

“My name is Fiona Paulsen.  I’m—that is, my father said you were a friend of his and that if I was in trouble, I should come to you.”

“Your father?”  The woman peered at Fiona, frowning.  Fiona waited, curious whether Ms. Vecchio would be able to figure it out on her own.

And she did.  Her eyes suddenly got really big and she gave a little gasp and actually took hold of Fiona’s chin and tilted her face up for a better look.  Fiona stood still and let her do it, even though the touch made her eyes sting with tears.

“Holy God,” Ms. Vecchio breathed.  “You’re _Fraser’s_ daughter.  Aren’t you?  You must be, with those eyes and that mouth. . .”

Fiona nodded.  “Benton Fraser was my father.  I, um, I didn’t know him very well, we only met a couple of times, and I was really little when. . .But he sent me letters sometimes—”

The rest of her story was lost, at least for the moment, because Ms. Vecchio pulled Fiona into a tight hug with the arm that wasn’t balancing the baby, squashing the breath out of her. 

“What are you doing here?” Ms. Vecchio asked, when she finally released Fiona.  “You don’t live here, do you?  No, you said—Are you here all by yourself?  Where is your—are you in some kind of trouble?”

She swept Fiona into the house as she fired off questions and half-questions, not stopping long enough to let Fiona answer any of them, or to breathe, for that matter.

“Good job, sweetie,” her mother whispered, following invisibly on her heels.  “You just keep doing what you’re doing.  She’ll love you; she _wants_ to love you.  And look, you’ve got her crying already.”

It was true: Ms. Vecchio was sniffling between phrases.  But after settling Fiona in a chair at the table and depositing the baby in a high chair, she was also moving purposefully around her large kitchen, assembling enough eggs, bacon, vegetables, and baking ingredients to fix breakfast for a large group, talking all the while but not really saying anything new.  She also couldn’t seem to stop touching Fiona; just little brushes of her hands over Fiona’s hair or light pats on her shoulder.  When she finally plopped herself down into a chair across from Fiona, she dabbed at her wet eyes with a tissue, planted her elbows on the table, and leaned her chin on her hands, staring into Fiona’s face.

“Now,” she said.  “Tell me all about it.”

Fiona had a wild impulse to blurt out the truth: _My parents are both dead, but they’re still here, and I just found out that maybe nothing I ever knew about either of them is really true, and I don’t know what to do._   But no, of course she couldn’t say that.  Not to Ms. Vecchio; not to anyone; and especially not in front of her mother, who was lounging against the refrigerator, examining its display of crayon drawings and grocery lists and telephone numbers with a hungry little smile.

Fiona took a deep breath and let her eyes drop to her fingers as they traced patterns in the condensation on the side of her glass.

“I, um, my mother. . .my mother died, she—there was an accident, or. . .I’m not really sure.  I wasn’t with her.  No one wanted to tell me exactly what happened.”

“You poor thing.”  Ms. Vecchio patted Fiona’s hand.  “Was this. . .recently?”

Fiona nodded.  “Three weeks ago.  We don’t have any relatives, and there was no one who. . .who wanted me.  But I knew Constable Fraser’s address, from the letters, even though he hadn’t written in a long time, and I thought. . .I thought, if I could just get here, and find him, he’d take care of me.  But then—I didn’t know he was—and I don’t have any money, or anywhere to _go_ —“  Fiona’s voice wobbled and her throat was tight with tears; she let them take her over.

“Shh, shh, it’s all right, honey, it’ll be all right, don’t worry.”  Ms. Vecchio scooted around to Fiona’s side of the table and hugged her close.  Her sweater was soft and smelled nice; Fiona let herself snuggle against Ms. Vecchio for a few seconds, just enjoying the feeling of being held.  Protected. 

But that wasn’t what she was there for, and it wasn’t fair to take what Ms. Vecchio was offering, not when she was only offering it because Fiona had lied to her.  So she made herself keep talking; keep lying.  She’d already started; if she didn’t get what she came for, then all the lies would be for nothing.

“I didn’t know where else to go,” she whispered.  “He talked about you, in one of the letters, you and your brother.  His best friends, he said, and if I was ever in Chicago—”

“Of course, of course, honey, don’t worry.  You haven’t done anything wrong.  You were right to come here, I’m glad you’re here.  Any family of Fraser’s is my family, got it?  You’re welcome to stay here, as long as you want, while we figure out—or, you know, as long as you want to.  I’ve got plenty of room, although I’ve also got plenty of kids.  Only some of them are mine.”  She broke into a smile, which made her pretty face look younger.  “I don’t know if—if Frase would have told you, no, probably not, you must have been really little when he—when he passed on.  But maybe your mother—”

“Told me what?” Fiona interrupted, which was rude, but Ms. Vecchio didn’t seem surprised, so maybe she expected people to just break into her monologues.  At least it did the trick and distracted her from asking about Fiona’s mother.

“I take care of children who need somewhere to stay,” said Ms. Vecchio.  “If they’re waiting to be adopted, or. . .well, for lots of reasons.  So, it won’t be any trouble to have you stay here, I promise.  Not that I wouldn’t do it even if it was trouble—oh, you know what I mean, don’t you?”

Behind Ms. Vecchio, Fiona’s mother rolled her eyes.

“I think so,” said Fiona.  “But I’m very grateful to you, in any case.  I—I wonder. . .I didn’t really know my father, you know.  But I’d like to, I mean, I wish I knew what he was like.  What his life was like.  Why—”  She bit her tongue; better to let Ms. Vecchio guess what sorts of things a girl who’d never met her father might want to know.

“Oh. . .”  Ms. Vecchio smiled, blinking away more tears.  “He was a wonderful man, your father.  There’s so much I could tell you. “

“Would you?” asked Fiona.  “I mean. . .if it’s not too much trouble?  I’m probably interrupting you in the middle of something.”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about that, honey.  I’ve already fed Nathaniel, now I’ve got to get breakfast going for everyone else, but we can chat while I do that.  You just make yourself comfortable.”

“Is there something I can do to help?” offered Fiona.

“Oh, you’re such a sweetie.  If you could chop up those peppers and onions, that would be a big help.  I’m doing omelets, it’s kind of a pain but it’s a good way to get some vegetables into them at breakfast time.”

Fiona started slicing the vegetables as Ms. Vecchio bustled around mixing up batter and pouring it into a muffin pan.

“It’s too bad my brother isn’t here, he’d love to meet you.  But I can tell you whatever you want to know about—about your father.  Fraser and me, we were. . .well, we were quite close.  He could talk to me about _anything_ , you know?”

“I wish I could meet your brother, too,” said Fiona.  “Fr—my father spoke so highly of him.”

“Yeah, it’s too bad Ray lives in Florida these days,” said Ms. Vecchio, bending down to put the muffins in the oven.  “I still don’t know what he was thinking, moving down there, but he calls up every week all winter long just to brag about the weather.”

Fiona glimpsed her mother’s frown as Ms. Vecchio straightened up.  She tried to keep her own disappointment from showing on her face.  _Florida.  That’s all the way across the country._  

“One step at a time,” said her mother.  “Find out as much as you can, then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

Fiona ducked her head a little to show her mother she understood, then fixed her eyes attentively on Ms. Vecchio.

“Your father first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of _his_ father,” said Ms. Vecchio with a dreamy smile.  “And he stuck around working a stupid boring paper-pushing job at the Canadian Consulate so that he could spend the rest of the time working with my brother to clean up this town. . .”

 

                                    *                                                *                                    *

 

Ray woke up with the sun in his face and a cramp in his neck.  He lay there for a little while, wondering what the hell he was doing sleeping on the couch.  _Oh yeah.  Little Orphan Annie.  Fraser’s daughter.  Fiona.  Jesus._

He stretched slowly, wishing for the lost flexibility of his twenties with every pop and creak and ache.  _Definitely slowing down.  It’s the desk job.  Or my unrighteous lifestyle catching up with me.  Bet Fraser would still be in just as good shape as ever._

He winced.  Normally he tried to avoid thinking stuff like that too much—although these days thinking about Fraser made him more happy than sad.  Nostalgic, maybe.  But today. . .there was that _other_ bombshell that exploded yesterday, and today was full of shrapnel from it, and Ray didn’t know whether he was gonna start bleeding from it or. . .the metaphor had seriously gotten away from him, but the point was: Fraser wasn’t _gone._   Fraser had apparently spent the past six years hanging out having ghostly heart-to-heart chats with his daughter.  And now Fraser was _here._   Ray couldn’t see him or touch him or hear him (except, apparently, when he could, which was weirder and almost worse than not hearing him at all), but in some way, Fraser was here in Chicago, in Ray’s apartment.  In his life.

Well, not in _Ray’s_ life, exactly; in Fiona’s.  Which brought Ray back to the headache of what to do about Fiona.

“Well, the thing I’ve gotta do about her right now is get her some breakfast,” he muttered, hauling himself to his feet and shaking his head in hopes of clearing away some of the morning fuzziness.  “There’s a challenge I can handle, at least.”

Not that he had much in the way of breakfast food on hand, and the kid was probably too young for coffee, though Ray was dying for a cup himself.  A glance at the clock as he was screwing around with coffee filters told him that it was nearly ten in the morning.  Which was a lot later than he normally got up on a weekday, though about usual for a Saturday; he hadn’t thought about setting an alarm when he crashed on the couch. 

Come to think of it, if Fiona was anything like her father (boy, that still weirded him out, thinking of Fraser as anybody’s daddy), she’d probably been awake for hours, waiting for Ray to wake up and feed her.  The bedroom door was closed, and he didn’t hear any noise in there, but she seemed to be a pretty quiet kid, and to have manners like Fraser’s (at least, when she chose to apply them, which was also weirdly Fraser-like).  She probably figured it’d be rude to wake Ray.  She was probably sitting there in Ray’s bed reciting _Paradise Lost_ to entertain herself.

Except that all of a sudden Ray’s gut was ringing alarm bells, even as he tapped gently at the bedroom door.

“Fiona?  You awake?  Want some breakfast?”

There was no answer.

He turned the knob as quietly as he could and inched the door open.

His bed was neatly made.  There was no sign of Fiona, her clothes, or her backpack.  And the window, with its convenient fire escape outside, was wide open.

“Fuck.  Fuck, fuck, fuck.”  He kicked the doorframe, which didn’t so much relieve his tension as bruise his bare toes, but at least it gave him something else to swear about for a minute.

“All right, think,” he told himself as he hustled into the bedroom to pull on some fresh clothes.  “Fiona seemed all right when she went to bed, so what happened?  Nobody snatched her; she’s smart and I bet she knows how to put up a fight, or at least scream the house down.  Besides, no kidnapper’s gonna stop to make the bed.  Someone came and got her and she went willingly?  Could be.  She took off by herself?  Sure, but why?  Sick of my company, maybe, but where the hell would she go?  She doesn’t know anyone else in Chicago. . .well, no, I don’t know that, but. . .”

He had one leg in his jeans when it struck him.  Vecchio.  Fiona was real interested in Vecchio, and pretty pissed off that Ray had stonewalled her about him.  Vecchio wasn’t easily accessible, but if you wanted information about him, the obvious place to go was his family.  To Frannie, who Fraser didn’t want Fiona staying the night with.

Hopping on one foot, he juggled his cellphone with one hand while wrestling his pants on with the other.

“Jenny, Kowalski here.  Listen, radio Martinez and Brewer, they’re out keeping an eye on Frannie Vecchio’s place.  Ask them if they’ve seen a girl hanging around the area or even going into Frannie’s.  She’s about twelve, five feet couple of inches, lots of curly dark hair.”

“Like that kid who was missing her parents yesterday?”  Sharp kid, Jenny.

“That very one.”

While Jenny had him on hold, Ray got his boots and holster on.

“Sir?” came Jenny’s voice.

“Yeah, what’s the news?”

“Detective Martinez says that a girl rang Ms. Vecchio’s doorbell about half an hour ago.  Ms. Vecchio hugged her and took her inside and she hasn’t come out, at least, not through the front.”

“Excellent.  Thanks, Jenny.  Tell ‘em to report if she leaves.  In fact, tell ‘em to follow her if she leaves, but keep it subtle.”

He tried not to break too many traffic laws on the way to Frannie’s. 

 _She’s just a kid, how much trouble can she possibly make for a tough cookie like Frannie?_  

But that was bullshit, and he knew it.  He knew from personal experience that kids younger than Fiona did nasty shit all the time ( _robbery, arson, murder. . ._ ).  That wasn’t how he read Fiona, though; she seemed like a decent kid.

_Or am I just kidding myself because she’s Fraser’s?  Seeing what I want to see?_

He ground his teeth and floored it through a yellow light.

He’d worked himself up into such a state of frantic paranoia that he was almost surprised to see Frannie’s house still standing, looking just like it always did.  He’d half expected it to be wreathed in flames and smoke, like that first day he’d met Fraser.  (That had been someone trying to get back at Fraser by hurting the people he loved, too.  The smartest crazy psychos knew that was the way to get to him.  You could beat the guy to a pulp and he’d bounce right back at you, not to mention he was damn hard to kill. . .)

Ray slammed the car door and strode up the front steps of 2926 North Octavia, pushing away the memory of Fraser crumpled in the red snow ( _hard to kill, until that one time when it was all too fucking easy_ ).

Frannie answered the bell without too much delay.

“Ray!” she greeted him, looking surprised and distracted but not like she was in any sort of mysterious danger.  “What a lucky coincidence!  You’ll never believe who I’ve got in my kitchen right now.”

“Fraser’s daughter,” said Ray.  Frannie’s eyes got all round, but Ray didn’t give her time to say anything.  “I was, uh, babysitting her, but she slipped the leash this morning.”

“You knew she was in town and you didn’t tell me?”  Frannie looked like she was wavering between hurt and anger.  Ray didn’t wait to see which side she’d come down on; he brushed past her into the house and made for the kitchen with Frannie tailing him.

“Sorry, Frannie,” he said.  And he was, because of course Frannie would want to know that Fraser had a daughter, of course she’d want to meet her.  And he _would_ have told her, if it hadn’t been for Fraser’s context-free warning. . .and his own worries about Victoria, be fair.  And yeah, Frannie was smarter than she came across, but she could be a soft touch, too, and she had never been exactly rational when it came to anything related to Fraser.

“It’s kind of complicated,” he said.  “There’s this whole. . .thing, it ain’t clear what’s going on with Fiona, exactly, there’s. . .stuff I’ve gotta figure out.  Cop-type stuff, okay?”

“What the heck is that supposed to mean?” Frannie snapped, apparently having decided to go for anger.  “Don’t try to tell me you think Fiona’s done something wrong.  That’s just—If Fraser were alive to hear you say that, he’d spin in his grave, you know he would.”

Fiona was sitting at the kitchen table (good; it would have been embarrassing if he’d guessed wrong and she’d gone out the window again).  She looked up at him with an expression that way too freaking much like Fraser’s _Of Course There’s Nobody Sneaking A Shellacked Dead Body Into The Supply Closet Behind Me, That Would Just Be Silly_ face.

“Hey, kid,” he said.  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s rude to take off without saying goodbye to your host?  Hope this ain’t too much of a habit of yours or nothing.”

Fiona’s mouth took on a hint of a pout and her chin got all stubborn.  “I’m not bothering Ms. Vecchio,” she said.  “She invited me in.”

“Yeah, I bet she did, she’s a real sweet lady, but we’re going now, so say goodbye.”  Ray took Fiona’s elbow, hoping she wouldn’t make him drag her out of the chair and sling her over his shoulder.  He could do it, easy, she probably didn’t weigh hardly anything, but that kind of fuss wasn’t going to do him any good with Fiona _or_ Frannie.

He saw her consider it, but she didn’t dig her heels in.  She let him usher her out of the kitchen, pausing only long enough to grab her backpack.

“Bye, Frannie,” said Ray as he headed for the front door.  “Thanks for looking out for her, I really appreciate it.  Sorry for the trouble.”

“Ray, wait, what on Earth is going on?  Is there some kind of trouble?”

“No, no trouble, we’ve just gotta motor now.”

“Well, I don’t see what could be so important at ten on a Saturday morning that you can’t even sit down and say hello and let Fiona finish her breakfast—”

“Look, I can’t stop and explain right now, so just take a chill pill, okay?”  That made steam come out of Frannie’s ears, but Ray really did not want to get pinned down trying to reason with Frannie, especially when A) he didn’t really know what was going on himself, and 2) if he did, he wouldn’t be able to tell her about it in front of Fiona.

 _Damn it, Fraser, just ‘cause I’m the intuition guy doesn’t mean I like stumbling around in the dark playing by ear.  Couldn’t you have sent me a frigging memo?_   Which didn’t even make sense, he knew that, but the situation felt so stupidly familiar, him following Fraser’s instructions with just enough information to get him into trouble and not nearly enough to get him out of it.

“Listen, Frannie,” he said, shaking Frannie’s hand off his arm while maneuvering Fiona out onto the porch.  “I’ve got kind of a what-was-his-name, Bruce Spender situation on my hands right now, you savvy?”

Frannie frowned at him in confusion.  Fraser would have understood right off the bat; Frannie might figure it out, or not, but it was the best Ray could do.

“Goodbye, Ms. Vecchio,” said Fiona over her shoulder as Ray hustled her down the steps.  “It was a pleasure meeting you.  Thank you so much for everything.”

“What, no _Thank you kindly?_ ” Ray growled as he gunned the engine.

Fiona snapped her seatbelt into place and said, primly, “My mother doesn’t like that expression.  She always says it’s one of those things that make everyone think Canadians are hicks.”

Ray snorted.  “Yeah, well, she has a point.”

“Why don’t you want me to talk to Ms. Vecchio?” asked Fiona.

“Why’d you sneak out of my window to do it behind my back?” countered Ray.

“Because I knew you wouldn’t ever help me find her,” said Fiona.  “You don’t want me to find out anything about Detective Vecchio, and you don’t want me to find out anything about Constable Fraser except what _you_ tell me.  Besides, you said I wasn’t under arrest.”

“You’re not,” Ray sighed.  “Though you keep pulling stunts like that, I might have to turn you over to child services after all, let them take care of you official-like.”

“No!  You promised!”  Maybe Fiona was just throwing a tantrum to get what she wanted, but she sounded genuinely panicked, just like the last time he’d mentioned child services.  At least she couldn’t bolt this time, not out of a moving car.

“That’s right,” said Ray evenly.  “And I also said I’d take care of you and keep the bad guys away, and I can’t do that if you’re sneaking out the window and running around all over town.  Forget bank robbers coming to kidnap you, this is your first time in Chicago, you’re going to get yourself rolled and raped in an alley or hit by a fucking taxi cab.”

He glanced over at Fiona and saw her eyes go wide for a second before she set her jaw and said stubbornly, “I can take care of myself.”

“Ain’t gonna get a chance to find out different,” he told her.  “Look, you gonna behave, or am I gonna have to change my mind about arresting you?”

“You won’t do that,” she said.

 _“You’re not going to kill this man,”_ said Fraser’s voice in his memory, calm and sure.  _“It is not what you do.”_   And of course he hadn’t done it.

Ray sighed.  “No, you’re probably right, I won’t.  Not for being a brat, anyway.  But I’m not joking: I can’t look out for you if I can’t find you.  This running away shi—stuff is not okay.”

It was another whole stoplight before Fiona spoke up again, softer now.  “Please don’t send me away.  Don’t make me go to some. . .place.  With strangers.”

“Why are you so scared about that?” asked Ray.  “You know you just ran away _to_ a foster home, right?  That’s what Frannie does, I’m sure she gave you an earful about it.  She seem like a dragon who was gonna eat you for lunch?”

“Then why didn’t you want me to stay with her?” asked Fiona.

“Told you before.  If you really are in danger, I’d rather have the axe murderers come busting in my window than Frannie’s.  Someone might get hurt.”

“But then. . .you can’t send me to anyone else, either,” pointed out Fiona.  “You wouldn’t want to put them in danger, either.”

 _Damnit, kid._   Ray pulled a fast left turn, squeaking past the oncoming traffic.

“All right, smarty-pants, you’re right, I ain’t gonna send you to anyone else.  I’m gonna take care of you myself and make sure you stay safe, because it’s my job to keep people safe, and because you’re Fraser’s and he asked me to.”  He hung a right, tapping the horn to warn the jaywalking pedestrians to get out of his way.

“But look,” he went on, “You’ve got to help me out, here.  I’m a cop, not some kind of fairy godmother.  I can keep you safe if you stick with me, but if you really _want_ to get yourself killed, I’m not going to be able to stop you.”

And all of a sudden the words that had just out of his mouth were looping around in his head, and with them, images: _Fiona’s frail little body splayed broken in an alley_ — _dirty red snow—Fraser’s face melting with grief—frozen with disappointment and anger—Fraser’s grey empty eyes staring up at Ray—staring up at Ray out of a little girl’s face. . ._

Vision blurring, Ray fought to suck in a breath through his tight throat.   Somehow, he managed to get the car over to the side of the road without crashing.  He pulled into a bus stop, cut the engine, and let his head drop to rest against his hands on the steering wheel while his body tried to shake itself to pieces.

“ _Leftenant_ Kowalski?”  Fiona’s voice sounded weirdly far away. 

 _Shit, I must be freaking her out,_ he thought, and pulled himself together enough to mutter, “I’m fine, I’ll be okay, just gimme a sec.”

It was more than a second, but probably nowhere near as long as it seemed, before he calmed down enough to breathe normally and push himself upright.  Rubbing his hand over his mouth, he looked over at Fiona, who was watching him anxiously.

“Sorry about that.”  His voice sounded like he’d just smoked half a pack of cigarettes.  He cleared his throat and gave her as much of a smile as he could manage, which wasn’t much.  “Didn’t mean to scare you or nothing.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Sure.”  He felt exhausted, probably looked it too, but that at least had to be more reassuring than melting down in the middle of traffic.  “I just. . .I really don’t need to see you get hurt, okay?”

“Because of—of my father?”

_Too clever by half, kid._

“Partly.”  He let his head fall back against the headrest, closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and looked over at her.  “But mostly. . .I seen a lot of people messed up in a lot of ways, hurt, killed—it’s part of my job, but. . .it don’t ever get easier.  Someone gets hurt on my watch. . .that cuts a piece out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fiona softly, Fraser-sincere.

“Yeah, me too.”  Ray rubbed the back of his neck.  _I’m getting too old for this shit._  

He fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and had one in his hand, was fishing for his lighter, before he remembered he’d promised himself not to light up in front of her.

“Sorry,” he said weakly, putting the smoke back in the pack.  “It’s gross, I know.  Bad habit.”

“I don’t mind,” she said.  Which was almost certainly a polite lie, but he was shaky enough to be willing to be rude and take her at her word.  He put the window down first, though, and when he took his first drag, he was careful to blow the smoke outside.

“Look,” he said, once he’d smoked it halfway down and was starting to feel less like he was going to shake apart any second.  “What is it you want to find out?  What happened between your dad and your mom?  There’s only two people who ever knew that, and I don’t think either of them ever told anyone.  You have to ask them.”

“I can’t ask my mother.”  Fiona’s voice was tight.  “And I can’t trust what Constable Fraser says, even if he did tell me.”

 _Can’t ask Mom because she’s dead, or because she won’t tell?_ Ray wondered, but this was not the time to push on that question.

“If that’s the case, then you’re never going to know the truth,” he said.

Fiona’s jaw went all stubborn again.  “I can find out the real facts about the events in those reports,” she said.

“How are you going to do that?” he asked.  “I mean, for the sake of argument, let’s assume I’m helping you, here.  I can track down a bunch of cops whose names are on that report, and who will swear that everything in it is true, either because they were telling the truth in the first place, or because they were lying at the time and they’re going to keep lying to cover it up.”

“What about the physical evidence?” asked Fiona, sounding a little less confident than before.

“From thirteen years ago?  I mean sure, there’s stuff in storage, whatever was gathered when the cops went over Fraser’s apartment, and from the murder at the zoo, and the Vecchio house.  Probably not much from Fraser’s, they wouldn’t have taken his stuff, but I bet there’s two million plastic bags of random broken crap from the Vecchios’ sitting in a box somewhere.  But I don’t know what you’d be looking to find to prove anything one way or the other. . .”

A flash of memory: _Sitting on his couch, Fraser beside him, looking at crime-scene video. . .Fraser pointing to the ring left by a coffee cup on three overlapping pieces of paper. . ._

 _But we at least knew there was something interesting about that piece of paper,_ he thought _.  We at least had a_ lead _. . .And what the hell kind of evidence do you look for to prove that the original investigation_ wasn’t _crooked?_

“I don’t _know_ ,” said Fiona.  “We haven’t looked at it yet.  Isn’t looking for clues the whole point of your job?”

“Sure, but usually I have some place to start, some reason to be investigating in the first place.  Especially something like this, looking into a cold case, more than ten years old.  All I got right now is some kid claiming that the straightest guy I ever met was a dirty cop and who knows what else.”

Another memory: _Sam Franklin handing over his gun and badge and then reaching over to pat Ray’s cheek, that old gesture of affection, nothing but a lie all down the line. . .Ray felt the fingerprints on his face for days, like Sam had smeared him with hot tar. . ._

Ray shook his head, trying to snap out of it.  _No.  Not Fraser.  Anyone else, but not him._

“He’s hiding _something_ ,” said Fiona.  “Whatever happened back then, he never wanted me to know about it.”

“That don’t mean it’s a cover-up, just that he don’t want to talk about it,” said Ray, but even as he did, he heard his own voice, protesting just as passionately as Fiona’s:  _I know when somebody's lying, Fraser; she's lying. She did not kill her husband._

And Fraser had taken Ray at his word; Welsh had given him the okay.  On nothing more than Ray’s hunch, they’d looked into the Botrelle case, eight years cold.   And he’d been right.

“You’re just afraid of finding out something you don’t like,” said Fiona.

Ray laughed humorlessly.  “What, you’ve decided I ain’t in on it after all, whatever _it_ is?”

Fiona shook her head.  “You believe in him.  If Constable Fraser. . .did anything wrong, you don’t know about it.”  She sounded absolutely confident.  “But isn’t it better to know?”

“Better.  That’s one way of putting it.”  Thinking about Franklin made him sick, still, after all these years.  But imagining himself still thinking of Franklin as a good cop, a good guy, a friend. . .

_There’s nothing to find.  Fraser was never a thief or a murderer or a backstabber.  Metcalf framed him, Fraser exposed her, Vecchio shot him by mistake while he was trying to arrest her.  And the only person I’ve got to prove anything to, here, is a kid who’s freaked out because she just discovered that her mother has been keeping secrets from her all her life._

“Okay, look,” said Ray.  “I’ll make you a deal.  I’ll look into this for you.  For real: full effort.  I’ll open up the old Metcalf case, go over whatever evidence I can dig up.  See what I can shake out of the RCMP and the Juneau PD about the original robbery.  You don’t get to put your hands on evidence or interrogate people, but I’ll tell you what I’m doing and listen to your ideas.  There’s still going to be stuff I can’t tell you or show you, because of rules or for other people’s safety.  But I won’t lie to you, and if I can’t tell you something, I’ll at least tell you that I can’t tell you.  I get to decide when we’re out of leads, you get to call bullshit—uh, you know, call me on it if you think I’m avoiding something obvious.  That’s what I can offer.”

Fiona thought it over, then said, “What’s my side of the bargain?”

“You agree to behave yourself.  No more sneaking around behind my back, no more disappearing act.  You stick with me, and you do what I tell you, and you don’t try to do any investigating on your own.  Well, except you’re free to talk to Fraser as much as you want, though it’d be real helpful if you’d let me in on anything he tells you that’s. . .germane.  We got a deal?”

Fiona gave him another one of those looks like she was trying to see right through his skull.  “If you agree to tell me what you know about him.  I mean, what he was like.  Who he was.  I need to know that, too.”

“Sure,” he said.  “I can do that.”

“Part of the deal.”

“Yeah, all right.  I got your word for your side of the bargain?”

“I promise I’ll stay with you, and do what you say, and not run away or try to investigate on my own.  As long as you do what you said you would.”

Ray nodded.  “And I promise to do all that stuff I just said.”

She frowned a little—and yeah, the deal gave him a lot of wiggle room, he’d be suspicious too in her place, but what she could get from him was still better than what she could easily get on her own.  Which she must have figured, because when he held out his hand, she shook it.

“You do understand that even assuming you trust me to tell you straight—which I will—I’m mostly just going to tell you what a great guy Fraser was?  I mean, you’re asking his best friend, here.”

“I know,” she said.  “But it’s all evidence, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely.”  He tossed his cigarette butt out the window, then eased the GTO back out into the traffic, driving more carefully than usual.

“And one can judge a man by the company he keeps,” said Fiona.

If that was true, Ray wondered what it said about either him or Fraser.  Or Fiona herself, for that matter, who had apparently grown up in some pretty fucking mixed company.  But he just said, “I bet you got that from Fraser, it sounds like something he’d say.”

“Yes,” she admitted.  “But he didn’t make it up.  It’s Euripides, I read it in a book.  Not in the original, of course; I don’t know Greek.”

“Yet.”  Ray flashed her a smile and saw the ghost of an answering smile cross her face before he had to turn back to watching the road.

“Besides,” said Fiona after the next traffic light.  “Just because he said it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”


	6. Chapter 6

“There’s not much point going in to the station today,” said Lieutenant Kowalski, hitching himself onto one of the stools by the counter that separated his living room from his kitchen.  “Everything’ll just take twice as long, and half of what we want involves talking to people who won’t be around on the weekend.  But I’ll make some calls, get some wheels moving.” 

Punching the keys on the phone, he got up again and started aimlessly pacing, tethered to the counter by the phone cord.  Fiona, watching him massage the bridge of his nose with his free hand, wondered if he had a headache.

“Hey, Jenny, Kowalski here.  Listen, I need you to pull some files for me, and also get me an appointment to go down to the central evidence storage and take a look at some old stuff. . .Metcalf case, 1995, I don’t have the number on me, you’ll have to look it up. . .Yeah. . .Yeah, so I’m also gonna need you to chase down someone in Alaska who can tell you about a related case, 1985 or so, bank robbery, it’s in the file, you’ll see it. . .Great, yeah. . .There was also an arrest and extradition from Canada, so can you figure out who the right person in the RCMP would be to ask for details about that?  Hey, you want some breakfast?  There’s not a lot of options but I’ve got cereal at least.”

It took Fiona a moment to realize that that last part was addressed to her.  She started to say that Ms. Vecchio had given her breakfast, but she didn’t want to annoy him by reminding him of what had happened that morning, and anyway, now he was talking into the phone again.  So she just slipped past him into the kitchen area.

There was an empty coffee pot on the stove, and a box of filters lying on the counter.  He must have left the apartment without making coffee, she realized.  When he discovered she was gone. 

She heard him saying, “Oh, and first thing Monday, get hold of the Canadian Consulate, get me an appointment to talk with someone there. . . .Thanks, beautiful.  Look, put me through to Sullivan, would you?”

Fiona found a can of ground coffee and measured some out into a filter according to the instructions.  She put the kettle on to boil, then investigated the refrigerator, which was mostly empty but did contain milk, butter, and eggs.  The cabinets didn’t yield much in the way of baking supplies, but there was a box of packaged pancake mix.  She mixed up some batter, pausing to pour the boiling water into the coffee pot.

Either Lieutenant Kowalski didn’t eat at home much, she decided, or he just didn’t like to cook.  There had been the pizza last night, and he’d said something in the car about ordering take-out, and from what she’d seen of the city so far, it was full of restaurants and places selling all kinds of food, so maybe city people just didn’t cook for themselves.  The kitchen was certainly less cluttered than the rest of the apartment, with just a few basic pots and utensils, along with a microwave.  The front of the refrigerator was covered with a random collection of bills, scraps of paper with scrawled notes, a big paper three-leafed clover, magnets in the shape of cartoon animals. . .One magnet she recognized, identical to one she’d seen on Ms. Vecchio’s refrigerator: a red-and-white logo advertising the Memory Lanes bowling alley. 

Fiona crouched down to look at it more closely.  It gave a phone number, and an address in Florida.  She spent a minute memorizing the information, then stood up and went back to the stove to check on the coffee.

Lieutenant Kowalski spoke in staccato bursts into the phone.  “. . .files they emailed over last night, take a look and get this guy’s stats and description out. . . .there’s a list of serial numbers there, too, Canadian bills, but he might try to exchange them at a bank or something. . .”

He blinked when Fiona pushed a mug of coffee across the counter to him.  Phone cradled against his ear, he picked up the coffee and took a gulp.  It must have scalded his mouth, but if so, he didn’t seem to mind.  He flashed her a smile and a thumbs-up.

“. . .Metcalf case, I’m looking into it myself, want to keep this quiet for now. . .yeah, I know, listen, it’s probably nothing, but some new information came up that seemed like it might be connected, so I just want to make sure. . .”

By the time he got off the phone, Fiona had a stack of pancakes ready.

“Hey, what’s all this?” he asked, coming around into the kitchen.

“Pancakes,” Fiona stated the obvious.

“Yeah, I can see that.  You know, you didn’t have to—.”  He shook his head, waved the thought away.  “It smells great.  Thanks.  Especially for the coffee, God, save my life.”  He stepped past her to refill his cup.

“Sorry I don’t have much in the way of real food,” he said, getting out plates and silverware one-handed while slurping his coffee.  “We can go grocery shopping later today, how does that sound?  I know it might not look like it, but I actually do know how to cook a decent meal.  What do you like to eat?  We got pretty much everything available here, well, unless you’re into crazy stuff like bark tea and pemmican.  Although personally, I’m pretty sure no one in Canada actually eats that stuff either, I think Fraser was just pulling a really, really long-running joke on us all.”

“I know how to make pemmican,” said Fiona.  “But it isn’t something you normally eat.  I mean, it’s camping food.”

Fiona glanced anxiously over her shoulder, but there was no sign of her mother, who had vanished during Fiona’s conversation with Ms. Vecchio.  Fiona wasn’t sure whether her mother had had enough of listening to Ms. Vecchio’s rambling but enthusiastic stories about Constable Fraser, or whether she had something else to do (what _did_ ghosts do when they weren’t here?), or if she just wasn’t able to stay indefinitely. 

“Is he here?” asked Lieutenant Kowalski, noticing her movement.

“No,” Fiona told him.

“Listen, do me a favor?  If he does show up, let me know?  I kind of feel like an idiot, saying all that stuff in front of him last night and not knowing it.”

“That wasn’t part of the deal,” she said.

“Nah, it wasn’t.  But it’d be polite.”

“He’s really not here,” she told him.  “Scout’s honor.”

“Thought you said you weren’t in Girl Scouts,” he said.

Fiona ducked her head, embarrassed, though she wasn’t really sure why.  “I wasn’t.  But we. . .sometimes S—Constable Fraser used to say I was his troop of one.  Except it wasn’t official, but he’d never officially made Eagle Scout anyway because his troop hadn’t lasted long enough when he was a kid.”

Lieutenant Kowalski laughed.  “Yeah, so he memorized the manual and did all the badges on his own.”  He picked up their empty plates and went into the kitchen to shove them into the dishwasher. 

“Okay, so we’re going to have to hang tight as far as the cop-type investigation goes, but if you want to ask me stuff about Fraser, I got nothing better to do.  Here, I got an idea—hang tight, I’ll be right back.”  He disappeared into the bedroom, where Fiona could hear the sounds of him moving things around.

She wandered through the living room, looking at the assorted clutter, looking for clues.  She hadn’t had much chance to look around last night; Lieutenant Kowalski had been there with her, and the lights had been out for most of the time.  She hadn’t looked around the bedroom much, either; she didn’t remember going to bed, and in the morning, it had seemed more important to get an early start than to go through his things.  She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly, anyway.  Clues about her mother wouldn’t be here; clues about Ray Vecchio, possibly (there was the refrigerator magnet, after all). 

Clues about Fraser. . .there he was, in a photograph, in full dress uniform, looking like he always did, standing at the edge of a group of people, some of them in American-style police uniforms, others in regular clothing.  He was smiling formally at the camera; Lieutenant Kowalski, standing next to him, was looking at Fraser with a half-outraged, half-amused expression.  And there was another picture of Fraser; just him and Lieutenant Kowalski, in boots and parkas but with their heads bare; grinning at each other against a background of sunlight and snow.

She recognized his expression: Fraser with the solemnity knocked out of him by a little girl throwing snowballs for him to dodge (not that they would have connected), or by her laughter at a really stupid joke.  Waving up at her when she climbed to the very top of the big pine by the swimming hole.

She tried to imagine him smiling that way at her mother.

“Okay, Ms. Detective, what do you deduce from those photos?” said Lieutenant Kowalski, coming up behind her.

“You were friends, you worked together, you went on trips together.  You liked each other.  Like you said.”

She picked up the next picture, which showed a much younger Ray Kowalski, wearing a suit and with his hair slicked back, with his arms around a pretty blonde woman in a wedding dress.  It didn’t have anything to do with anything, but. . .

“This is your wife?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Yeah.  Well, my ex-wife.  Obviously.”  He gestured around at the apartment that showed no signs of a second person living in it.  “We got divorced, long while ago, now.  Before I met Fraser.  Actually, around the time you were born.”  He shrugged, almost apologetically.

“But you still have her picture,” said Fiona.  Not just one: she could see the same woman in two other pictures, further back on the shelf.

“Yeah.”  His eyes were on the photo in her hand.  “We were together, depending how you count, for more than twenty years, married for thirteen.  That’s still almost half my life, spent with her.  You don’t just forget that.  I don’t, anyway.  Even though we hurt each other, even though we’ve both moved on, part of me will always love her.”

His voice was wistful and his eyes soft as he took the picture from her.  His expression reminded her of the way he looked sometimes when he talked about Fraser.  Fraser had looked at him the same way, yesterday, a couple of times.  She’d never seen that look on Fraser’s face before—sad and fond and faraway—before, and certainly not about her mother.  Before they came south, if she mentioned her mother, Fraser’s expression would be reserved and polite.  And last night, as he’d stood there listening to Lieutenant Kowalski talk about why Fraser didn’t come after Fiona and her mother, Fraser’s posture had been stiff, his face stony. . .She didn’t want to think about how his face looked then.

And as for her mother. . .Sometimes she looked at Fiona with the kind of soft expression Kowalski wore now.  But when her mother talked about Fraser, it was with hot anger or cold anger or the kind of humor that isn’t really supposed to be funny.   

“We don’t have any pictures at home,” Fiona told Lieutenant Kowalski, because she couldn’t say what she was really thinking.  It was true, though.  No photographs of her mother and Fraser with their arms around each other, smiling into each other’s eyes like they didn’t even know the camera was there.  No photographs of anyone.

Kowalski’s head swung to look at her.  He understood what she was saying, she could tell.  Maybe he understood more than she’d really meant to tell him.  She wasn’t even sure how much she wanted to tell him.

“You know,” he said gently.  “Sometimes you can love someone more than anything, but you can’t live with them.  And loving someone don’t always mean you can keep from hurting them.  In fact, it’s much easier to hurt someone who loves you than someone who couldn’t care less.  And sometimes when people are in that situation, the smartest thing they can do is leave each other, which hurts like nobody’s business but is better than staying.”

She started at the picture of him and his not-anymore-wife sitting on a couch with an older couple posed next to them—his parents? Hers?

“Fraser—Constable Fraser really never said anything to you about my mother?” she asked.

“Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She glanced up at him; his lips tightened as he turned away to look across the room.  She shivered a little, remembering him white and shaking with his hands clenched around the steering wheel, remembering _her mother’s voice coming out of nowhere, her mother standing where no one had been a second before. . .“Fiona, listen to me, there’s been—an accident, you have to get out of the house”. . .Crouching in the bushes, shivering, watching the men invade the cabin, their voices echoing in the mountain air. . ._

To distract herself, and him, she asked the first question that came to mind, which was, “Did he have a girlfriend?  I mean, when you knew him?”

Lieutenant Kowalski looked at her for a moment, then shook his head.  “Nah, Fraser was pretty allergic to dating.”

“He wasn’t. . .with Ms. Vecchio, or. . .?”

He snorted.  “Not on your life.  I know Frannie probably told you all kinds of crazy stuff, but you can’t take her too serious when it comes to Fraser and women.  She had a crush on him forever, and he liked her as a friend but that was it, but she had a hard time accepting that.”

Fiona nodded, relieved.  She couldn’t picture Fraser with friendly, silly Ms. Vecchio.

“He didn’t. . .date anyone else?” she asked.

“Not really.  There were a couple of times he was maybe interested in someone, but it always ended before it started.  Mostly he seemed pretty shy about women, although part of that was that practically every woman he met wanted to, uh, date him, and most of them didn’t seem to care about what he wanted.” 

He looked over at her with a funny, almost worried expression.  “I guess you haven’t met a lot of boys, yet, but I’ll bet pretty soon you’re going to start having that problem.  I didn’t used to get why it was a problem—when I was your age, I thought it would be great to have everyone want to be with you.  But hanging around Fraser and seeing how uncomfortable it made him, all these women he had no interest in practically crawling all over him. . .” He shook his head with an apologetic smile.  “I guess this is a weird thing to be telling you about your dad, huh?”

It _was_ weird, thinking about Fraser with women that way, but she needed to know.  “Why wasn’t he interested?”

Lieutenant Kowalski looked thoughtful.  “Well, partly because most of the women who hit on him didn’t know him, they just thought he was good-looking.  It’s not much fun to feel like people just want you for your face or your body instead of what’s inside you.  But mostly. . .see, Fraser liked pretty much everyone he met who wasn’t actually evil, but he didn’t get close to hardly anyone.  I don’t know if he didn’t want to or just didn’t know how, but he always had a real thick shell and it was hard to get inside.”

“But you said he was interested sometimes?”

He nodded.  “Couple of times, but it didn’t go anywhere.  One time—this is actually pretty funny.  Remember I told you Fraser found out he had a half-sister he didn’t know about?  Well, when he first met Maggie, the two of them really hit it off, which made a lot of sense, they were both the same kind of freak.  I really thought they were gonna. . .But then they found out they were brother and sister, so of course that was the end of that.  The romantic part, I mean; they liked each other just fine as family afterwards.”

“Does Aunt Maggie live in Chicago?” asked Fiona.  She couldn’t go looking for her on her own, she’d promised, but still, it was best to get all the information she could.  It might be useful, and her mother would want to know.

“No,” he said.

He obviously didn’t want her talking to Aunt Maggie, any more than to Detective Vecchio, but Fiona pretended not to notice.  “Could we talk to her on the telephone?  I’d really like to meet her someday.”

“She can be hard to get hold of.”  He picked up the cardboard box sitting at his feet and went over to deposit it on the coffee table, then plopped down on the couch.  Fiona followed him.

Before she could decide whether to keep pursuing the topic of Aunt Maggie, he started talking again.  “The other time I saw Fraser really look like he was interested in a woman was this bounty hunter who came through town. . . .Actually, she was a lot like Fraser, too, in a lot of ways.  The outdoors stuff, good with guns and tracking and building things.  And now that I think about it. . .”  He hesitated, flicking a glance at Fiona, then shrugged and went on, “She looked kind of like your mom.  Maggie doesn’t, at all, but this chick. . .she had the long, dark hair, she was medium-tall. . .”

“What happened to her?” asked Fiona when he didn’t go on.

“Turned out she was married already.  She didn’t tell Fraser that up front, let him start falling for her, and maybe she kind of fell for him, too, but. . . .Well, her husband turned up and that was the end of that.”  He had something in his hands, a jumble of fiber that Fiona realized after a moment was the dreamcatcher she’d seen hanging over her bed—his bed—this morning.  He was looking down at his long fingers as they fidgeted with it, but she could tell his attention was actually on her.  “But I think the thing that really hurt him wasn’t so much that she left but that she’d been lying to him all along.”

“But _he_ lied!”  Outrage welled up in her.  “You keep talking like he cares so much about honesty and truth, but he lied to me for years, exactly like that woman lied to him.  And he lied to you too, about my mother.”

“Hey,” he said sharply, his head snapping up.  “There’s a difference between lying and not saying everything.  Nobody tells anyone _everything_ , and they probably shouldn’t.”

“Then why did he care about whether that lady told him she was married?”

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he sighed, “Because it mattered.  You don’t start something with someone when you’re still married to someone else, especially not if you’re chasing the someone else down so you can drag him home to keep being daddy to your kids.”

“It _mattered_ that he was my father,” Fiona insisted.  “It mattered why he hadn’t been with us before.”

“I agree.”  He sounded tired, but he also sounded like he meant it.  “But there might have been other things that mattered, too.”

“Like what?”

“He might have figured that telling you would hurt you more,” he said, but then he frowned and his gaze drifted back down to his restless hands.  Whatever he was thinking about, he didn’t seem to like it. 

After a moment, he shook off his distraction.  “Listen, when couples split up, they try—if they’re being mature about it—not to make their kids feel like they have to choose sides.  He might have just been trying not to put you in the middle.  Especially because he wasn’t in a position to. . .do anything.”

“Fine,” said Fiona shortly.  She wasn’t going to cry, there was absolutely no reason to cry, and anyway, he was just trying to make her believe what he wanted her to believe.  “But why wouldn’t he want to tell _you_ about my mother?”

“He might have figured that would hurt. . .her,” he said slowly.  “Or maybe it just hurt him too much to talk about it.”

“But you were his friend.”

He couldn’t completely hide his flinch, but he answered briskly, “Well, maybe he didn’t think I needed to know.   Or he didn’t need me to know.  Look, I don’t know, I can’t tell you why he didn’t tell me stuff he didn’t tell me.  Ask me something I can answer.”

“Was there a lot of stuff he didn’t tell you?” Fiona pressed her advantage.

“What?”

“It sounds like maybe he didn’t always tell you things?  As much as you wished he would?”

That hit home, too: his eyes showed it, although he kept his voice even as he answered, too carefully, “He was a pretty private person.  He’d give you the shirt off his back, but himself, he didn’t share so easy.  I was his best friend for years, his partner, probably knew him better than anyone in the world, but no, there was a lot he didn’t tell me.

“Did he tell Detective Vecchio?”

“I have no idea,” he snapped, then spread out one palm apologetically.  “Him, if anyone,” he said, more calmly.  “But you know, compared to my dad, or his own dad, Fraser was an open book.  Not being able to talk to your kid, it sucks but it’s not unusual, and it’s not a crime.”

“Didn’t that make you angry?  At him?”  She wasn’t sure why she was pushing him, except that the hot triumph of seeing that she was _right_ , that she _had him_ , was almost enough to melt the ice at the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah.  Sure.  But you don’t want to stay angry at a dead guy.  It just eats you up inside and poisons all the good memories.  I fought with him all the time when he was alive, but that was different, he could fight back, and there was always the chance I’d. . .shake some sense into him.  Or something.”  He shook his head. 

“Here.  Look at this.”  He held out the dreamcatcher to her.

“He made that?” she guessed.  She remembered Fraser talking her through the process of making her own: _“Eagle feathers are extremely difficult to obtain; there’s a process one must go through and unfortunately, I don’t see how you could gain access, so we’ll just have to do the best we can with the available materials. . .”_

“Yeah.”  He smiled softly.  “It’s got a real eagle feather, he had to jump through all these hoops to get it.  He gave it to me for—for my birthday, real soon after we met.  We were still kind of. . .I didn’t think he liked me much, honestly, and I thought he was this crazy guy who did stuff like running into burning buildings and climbing around on the roof of a moving car and pretending that bobbing for trout is a totally normal Canadian party game.  But he, I don’t know, woke up one day and decided we were going to be friends.  And he gave me this.  To let me know, I guess.”

“To keep you safe while you’re sleeping,” said Fiona. 

He smiled briefly.  “Yeah.  That, too.”

 _Thrashing awake, shivering with terror of something she couldn’t remember, seeing Santa standing beside her bed, keeping guard, keeping her safe. . .Later, he smiled at her as she stood on her bed to hang the dreamcatcher from the ceiling. . ._   It was hard to hold onto her anger, remembering that.

She turned the dreamcatcher over carefully, stroking the eagle feather.  Her mother had nothing like this.  Her mother’s things were mostly store-bought.  She had books and CDs and clothing and tablecloths and some local-made furniture, but the only things she had that looked like. . .presents, were things Fiona had made for her.

“You know,” said Lieutenant Kowalski.  “I been thinking a lot about the whole thing with Beth Botrelle—remember, the lady who went to jail for killing her husband, except she didn’t do it?”

Fiona nodded.

“That night, after we took her home—I was pretty wrecked about how just how much damage I’d done with one stupid mistake, and how much worse it had almost been.  But Fraser said that that was the wrong lesson to learn from it.  It wasn’t about the fact that I screwed up, which I did.  Or the fact that Beth got her life wrecked when she hadn’t done anything wrong, which was also true.  Way Fraser saw it, it all showed that there’s always hope that mistakes can be fixed, that wrongs can be forgiven.  There’s always the chance for a new start.”

Her peripheral vision told her he was looking at her, but she pretended not to notice.  She knew what he was trying to do. 

When she didn’t say anything, he went on, “I gotta tell you, I nearly popped him one when he said that, ‘cause it seemed like he was saying all the bad stuff didn’t matter, woman gets her life flushed down the toilet, but hey, there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!  But he said no, he didn’t mean to—what’s the word?— _belittle_ the tragedy of it.  But that he believed there was always a chance of redemption.  And that that was—was the thing that made life worth living.”

If it had been Fraser telling the story, this was the point where he would stop and make Fiona figure out the moral for herself, and probably not even ask her what she thought it was.  Not that it wasn’t obvious.

 _Fine,_ she thought peevishly. _You felt guilty for not being around to be my father when you were alive, so you decided to come back to do it after you were dead.  But you can’t fix the past.  You won’t even tell me about it._

“To be fair, the last I recall, you didn’t want to hear what I had to say,” said Fraser, appearing behind the sofa where Lieutenant Kowalski was sitting.

“Of course,” Lieutenant Kowalski went on, “The other moral of the story is that Fraser was the kind of friend who does more than just watch your back, he. . .watches over your soul.”

Fraser stared at him with an astonished expression.

“What?” she asked Fraser.

Lieutenant Kowalski saw where she was looking and craned his head over his shoulder. 

“Everyone has their own interpretation of events,” said Fraser softly, looking down at Lieutenant Kowalski’s face.  “And I suppose however well one knows a person, one can never predict exactly what he thinks about. . .”  He shrugged.  “Most things, really.”

Lieutenant Kowalski turned back to Fiona, who said quickly, “Fraser just appeared.  He’s standing behind you.”

“What, is he being especially literal about the back-watching thing?”

“An interesting question,” said Fraser, moving around the end of the couch.  “If so, it’s not by conscious choice.”

Lieutenant Kowalski’s shoulders twitched and his eyes flickered towards Fraser.  Fraser stopped to look at him, but Lieutenant Kowalski turned back to Fiona with a sigh and a half-shrug.

“I’ve changed my mind,” Fiona told Fraser.  “I want to know.”

“Does that mean you’ll believe what I tell you?” asked Fraser mildly.

“It doesn’t matter.  It’s all evidence.”

Lieutenant Kowalski’s mouth twitched like he was holding back a smile.  Fiona scowled at him—why did grownups have to be so smug whenever you did something they’d suggested?

“Why didn’t you look for my mother?” Fiona asked.  “Even if you didn’t know about me, you could have—“  _hunted her_ “—tried to find her.”

“You know,” said Fraser in his pensive storytelling voice, “When my father was murdered, I was determined to find out what had happened and to bring his killers to justice.  And I did, in the end.  With Ray’s assistance.”

Fiona glanced at Lieutenant Kowalski, who said, “Not me.  Ray Vecchio,” and then got a funny startled look on his face.

“Ray?” asked Fraser.

“I—“  Lieutenant Kowalski stuck his finger in his ear and wiggled it around.  “Damn it.  Are you—is he still talking?”

“Not right now,” Fiona told him.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.  Go on. . .”  He waved one hand in Fraser’s general direction, staring down at his knees.

Fraser hesitated, then turned back to Fiona.  “As I was saying, I did discover who had killed my father and why.  But both of those pieces of information turned out to be. . .Well, my father had been murdered by one of his closest friends, a man he trusted, a man I looked up to.  And the reason was that the two of them had—“ He took a breath, falling into parade rest with his hands behind his back.  “—Had accepted bribes in exchange for allowing a crime to be committed.  My father reached a point where he couldn’t live with it any more.  His—his partner—didn’t want my father to turn him in.”

He paused, looking seriously at her.  Waiting for some kind of reaction, probably, but what did he want her to say?  She couldn’t help glancing at Lieutenant Kowalski— _Is that what he learned from his father?  He wanted to be a hero just like him and then he found out he wasn’t a hero at all?_ —but he was looking down at his hands and she couldn’t tell if he’d even heard what Fraser had said. 

“Now, I can’t truly say I’d prefer to have seen the murder left unsolved, the guilty parties at large,” said Fraser, slowly, sounding like it was an effort to get the words out.  “But in a very real way, I lost my father a second time that day, along with a trusted friend.  The RCMP sent me to Chicago as a. . .punishment, of sorts, for telling them what they didn’t want to hear.  And then they pretended they hadn’t heard it.  I’ve occasionally wondered whether they were wiser than I was.”

“So you’re not going to tell me anything, _for my own good?_   How come you get to decide that?  You’re not—”

“Hey,” Lieutenant Kowalski cut in sharply.  Fiona shut her mouth, her cheeks heating.  Fraser pressed his tongue against his bottom lip, and somehow that little gesture hurt too much to look at.  She stared at the gold button in the center of his chest instead.

“I once asked my father much the same thing,” said Fraser faintly.  “But I think. . .he was wrong, but he was right.  Six years old was too young to know.  Thirty-six was far too late.”

“I’m not a little kid,” said Fiona.

“I know.”  A sad smile flickered over his face.

“Everyone here thinks you were wonderful,” she said.  “They’d protect you, no matter what you did.  If you did something bad, they’d never tell.”

Fraser blinked.  “I think you may have encountered a biased sample so far.”

“What, you want me to dig up some mob bosses for her to interview so they can curse you out for putting them away?” muttered Lieutenant Kowalski.

“That would be educational, but perhaps not strictly necessary,” replied Fraser.

“That police report about my mother doesn’t make any sense,” said Fiona.  “There’s parts of the story missing.  They didn’t put in everything they knew.”

“Well, yes, that’s true,” Fraser admitted, but didn’t say anything else, just stood there looking at her.

_I want to know.  I want to know the truth.  Tell me what happened.  Tell me what you did._

She looked back at him, trying to make the words come out of her mouth.  She half-expected her mother to appear and. . .do something.  But nothing happened, and she didn’t say anything, either.

“Are you sure you really want to know?” asked Fraser.

“Fraser, this is bull.”  Smacking his hands against his thighs, Lieutenant Kowalski bounced to his feet and squared off in Fraser’s direction, although he wasn’t quite facing him all the way.  “I may have missed some words in there, but I heard enough of what you been saying to know you’re stonewalling.”

“That’s hardly a fair description—“ Fraser began, turning to him with a startled expression.

“Come off it, the kid wants to know about her mother, which, by the way is totally reasonable—“

“I’m the last person who should be telling her—“

“Bull _shit_ , you’re the only person who _can_ tell her—“

“Ray, I know you mean well, but you don’t understand—“

“Oh, I don’t understand?  What exactly is it that I’m too dumb to understand, Fraser?  What it’s like to wonder just how much someone hasn’t told me?  ‘Cause I understand that real well, buddy, I totally get—“  Hands gesticulating sharply, Lieutenant Kowalski took a step towards Fraser, then stopped dead, staring right at him.

“Ray?” asked Fraser softly after a moment.  “Ray, are you. . . ?”

“Holy fucking shit,” muttered Lieutenant Kowalski in a strangled voice.

“You can see me.  Can you?”

Lieutenant Kowalski just nodded.

Fraser blinked rapidly, looking stunned.

“Ray, I. . .”

Lieutenant Kowalski spun abruptly and strode to the window, where he stood with his back to the room, leaning one hand on the frame and covering his eyes with the other.  Fiona glanced up at Fraser, but he was looking at Lieutenant Kowalski’s back, not at her.

“Fiona, I wonder. . .that is, would you mind. . . ?”  He blinked a couple of times, then took a breath.  “What I mean to say is, Ray and I haven’t seen each other for quite some time, and we’d very much appreciate a few moments alone.”

He sounded so sad that Fiona didn’t have the heart to put up a fight. 

“Can you do that?” she asked.  “I mean, I thought you had to, you know, stay with me.  When you’re. . .here.”

“Precedent suggests that I have a little latitude,” he said.  “The next room shouldn’t be a problem.”  Now he did look her way.  “I don’t mean to. . .we’ll continue our conversation, I promise.”

“I know,” she said. 

A hint of a smile touched the corners of his mouth.  Then his eyes went back to Kowalski.

Fiona slipped into the bedroom and eased the door shut behind her. 


	7. Chapter 7

“Ray,” said Fraser’s voice softly behind him.  Ray pressed his fingers against his eyes, struggling to control his breathing.  He was doing okay until he realized he was waiting to feel Fraser’s hand on his shoulder, and that broke him down the rest of the way.

“Ray?” said Fraser again, right up close to him this time.  Crying like a fucking idiot, Ray turned to look at him, suddenly panicked that he might disappear again and Ray would _miss_ him, how did he know how long this crazy window would be open?

And there he was.  _Fraser._   Standing there in his red uniform, with his head tilted a little to one side, watching Ray with a grave, sympathetic expression that was so goddamn _familiar_ , it jolted Ray with the realization of just how faded his memories had become.  This was the real thing, every detail.

“Fraser.”  Ray felt himself break into a smile.  He swiped his wet eyes with his sleeve.  “Fucking Fraser.”

“Language, Ray,” Fraser murmured, but he wasn’t even pretending to mean it, not with that grin splitting his face.

“It’s—damn, it’s good to see you, buddy.”

“Likewise,” said Fraser.  “I’m sorry I—you know that I haven’t been deliberately avoiding, ah, manifesting to you, don’t you?  My father was able to let Buck Frobisher see him, but he never explained to me how that worked.  Indeed, I’m not sure he knew, himself.  The rules of the afterlife, such as they are, are a trifle opaque.”

“Fraser.  It’s okay.”

“I—understood.  Thank you.”

“C’mon and sit down.  Uh, I mean, can you?”

But apparently Fraser could, because he sat down in one of Ray’s armchairs just like he was really there.  Ray dropped into the other.

 _What the hell do you say to your best friend who’s been dead for six years?_ Ray wondered.  But Fraser had the jump on him, unsurprisingly.

“Ray, thank you for taking care of Fiona.  I know the circumstances are somewhat unusual—”

“Hey, compared to some of the situations you and me have been in, this ain’t nothing.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Though I wouldn’t mind knowing what the hell is actually going on,” Ray said.  “I mean, now that you’re in a position to actually tell me and all.”

“Ah.  Well, I’m not entirely sure. . .that is, I think you’ve heard many of the salient facts from Fiona.”

“She really is your daughter?” Ray asked.

“I presume so, or I wouldn’t be here.  I didn’t know. . .well, as you surmised last night.  The first I knew of her existence was when I opened a door in the Borderlands and found myself looking at her.”

“Borderlands?”

“It’s where one goes when—do you want me to try to explain this right now?  It’s somewhat complicated, not least because everything about it is either ill-defined or simply unexplained.”

Ray shook his head.  “You’re right, fascinating as a lecture on the afterlife might be, I probably don’t want to hear it right this second.  Tell me about Fiona.  More important, tell me about Victoria Metcalf.”

Fraser winced and glanced at the bedroom door.

“Victoria is Fiona’s mother,” he said.  “Again, this is my presumption, not first-hand knowledge, but Occam’s—“

“Razor, yeah, I get it.  I think it’s a safe bet.  Kid sure looks like Victoria’s picture, more than she looks like you, even.”

“You think Fiona looks like me?” asked Fraser.

“Oh, yeah.  Your eyes, especially.”

A wistful little smile played over Fraser’s face.

“And Victoria is. . . ?”  Ray prompted.

“Dead.”  The smile vanished, replaced by a grim expression.

“You know that for sure?  I mean, we’re talking about a woman who faked her own death once before.  If those files are accurate.”

“That’s true enough,” said Fraser, either missing Ray’s hint or, more likely, ignoring it.  “But in this case. . .well, it is true that I was not present for. . .whatever happened.  I haven’t seen the body.  However, Fiona tells me that her mother is, ah, in the same situation as myself.”

“In the—you mean she’s a ghost?”

“If that’s the term you prefer.”

“And she shows up to Fiona like you do?”

“Indeed.”

“Have you seen her?” asked Ray.

“No.”

“So how do you know Fiona’s telling the truth?”

“Ray,” said Fraser sharply.

“No, I’m serious.  I mean, she seems like a good kid, but. . .”  Now Ray was the one glancing over at the bedroom door and dropping his voice.  “But I don’t know her from Marilyn Monroe, and what I do know is that she was raised by a—”

“Ray.”

Ray sighed.  “A smart, ruthless, manipulative woman whose rap sheet includes robbery, arson, murder, and framing _you_ for god-knows-what-all.  And who, from what I can tell from the _files_ , last time she was in Chicago, the only thing she was after was fucking you over.  Which she didn’t get, in the end.  You think she’s any _less_ likely to be pissed at you now?”

It was Fraser’s turn to sigh.  “I would hope that after more than a decade, a person would be able to set aside thoughts of past wrongs and. . .find some measure of peace, yes.”

“It’s a pretty thought, Fraser, but do you have any reason to think it’s true?  I mean, if you’ve been hanging out with Fiona all this time, you must have some sense of what her mom’s been up to.  She become a nun or anything?”

Fraser shook his head.  “I haven’t observed her directly.  All I know about her is what I’ve heard from Fiona, and what I can deduce from the restricted slice of Fiona’s life I have seen.  They seem to live very quietly, in relative isolation.”

“Yeah, that’s the picture I was getting from Fiona last night.  A cabin up in the boonies somewhere.  Somewhere the cops don’t come ‘round asking inconvenient questions.”

“She is still a wanted criminal,” said Fraser, his lips tightening.  “Well, in fact, she isn’t any more.  Death wipes the slate clean in that respect.  In any case, simply because she didn’t wish to face justice for her past crimes, it doesn’t necessarily follow that she hadn’t turned over a new leaf.  She had a child to raise, after all, and as far as I can tell, she made Fiona a priority in her new life.”

“You’re saying she was a good mom?”

Fraser hesitated.  Ray frowned at him.

“I don’t think I can be considered either well-informed or unbiased on the subject,” said Fraser.  “All the evidence I’ve seen suggests that Fiona’s physical needs have always been amply provided for; her education, as well, given the limited resources of their living situation.  Fiona loves her mother very much and has always seemed to be a healthy, happy, if. . .understandably somewhat lonely child.”

“But. . .?” asked Ray.  When Fraser didn’t reply, he pushed harder.  “You thinking there might have been some kind of abuse going on?”

“No!” exclaimed Fraser.  “She wouldn’t—if there was anything like that, I would have—I’m sure I would have known.  Not only from talking to Fiona, though I do think I would have been able to read the signs.  But. . .if Fiona had ever been in real danger. . .I would have known.  I would have. . .felt her need.”

“That a metaphor, or some kind of ghost rule?” asked Ray.

“Well, as I say, the rules are a trifle obscure.  But I. . .I don’t, as a rule, _choose_ when to visit Fiona.  It’s more like I hear her calling to me, and go looking for a door to open that will get me there.”

“She, like, summons you?”

“Well, not consciously, I don’t think.  I must admit, the experience does cast a different light on my own interactions with my father.  I’d always assumed he chose his own times to drop in on me, and it often seemed they were chosen for maximum inconvenience to me. But now I wonder. . .”  He shrugged.

“Do you get to pick when to leave?”

“I can decide to leave.  But I can’t always decide to _stay._   I’m not sure if that’s up to Fiona or some sort of. . .supernatural law.”

“You gonna disappear on me without warning, Fraser?” asked Ray.

“I don’t know,” sighed Fraser.  “I’ll try not to.  That’s the best I can say.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it.  You play the hand you’re dealt.” 

Fraser gave him a weak smile.  “I had hoped that the afterlife would at least offer autonomy, to make up for its multitude of deficiencies.”

Ray reached out without thinking to pat Fraser on the shoulder, then yanked his hand back before it could pass through Fraser’s arm or whatever creepy thing might happen instead of contact with a body that wasn’t there.  He planted his palms on his thighs and dug his fingers into his own flesh.

“There’s another rule that never made much sense to me,” said Fraser softly.  “If it were simply that ghosts were intangible to the physical world, that would be logical.  But it seems to be not quite so simple.”  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a harmonica, which he held out to Ray.

“Fraser, what the--?”

“Go on, take it.”

Ray took the harmonica.  It sure felt real to him.  He lifted it to his mouth and blew a few experimental notes.

“It’s imaginary, of course,” said Fraser.  “Fiona could hear it, presumably, but you can’t wake your neighbors with it.”

“How do you know?” asked Ray.

“My father loaned me his gun, once,” Fraser replied.  “I had to demonstrate the point so he would stop bothering me about using it.  It felt real in my hand, and it fired, all right, but the bullets left no mark.  That seems to be the way it always is.  Probably for the best, really.”

He held out his hand for the harmonica, which he put back into his pocket.

“On the other hand,” he said.  “My father did occasionally manage to. . .make his presence known, physically.  Sometimes it’s possible. . .”

He slid off the chair to kneel on the floor among the melted-down candles that Ray hadn’t gotten around to clearing up from the night before.  He closed his eyes for a moment with a look on his face like he was testing the wind or listening for the sound of footsteps two buildings away.  Then he reached out and picked up one of the candles.

Maybe that should have been creepy, but it wasn’t like the candle was floating through the air by itself or anything.  All Ray saw was a guy with a candle in his hand.  Amazingly normal, really.  The only kind of weird thing about it was the way Fraser was looking at the candle, like it was some kind of valuable artifact or vital clue or. . .no, more like it was a picture of his dead mother or something.

“Hey, good job,” said Ray, mostly hoping to snap Fraser out of whatever mood he’d suddenly fallen into.

“It’s not hard, precisely,” said Fraser.  “Not strenuous, anyway.  It just doesn’t happen very often.  As I say, probably for the best.”  He slipped the candle into his pocket.

“What happens to it when you. . . ?”

“It’s best not to think too hard about these things,” said Fraser.

“So. . .you can touch objects but not people?” Ray asked.

“It’s not so hard and fast a rule as that, I don’t think.  I saw my father touch a living person, when it mattered.  Muldoon, in fact.  But the circumstances were. . .special.  He never touched me, nor Maggie.  And I’ve never been able to touch Fiona.  Though I admit, I haven’t often tried.  I don’t care to experiment with something like that, because there’s a chance it might turn out to be possible, but not a good idea.”

“Not a good idea, like how?”

Fraser shrugged.  “Many ghost stories portray the touch of the ghost as draining the life out of the living, or somehow pulling them towards the land of death.  I don’t know whether those legends have any basis in truth, but I’d rather not find out empirically.”

Ray shivered.  “Uh, right, sounds like a good idea.  But man, that sucks.  I mean, being there but not really, look but don’t touch.”

“Well, yes,” admitted Fraser.  “On the other hand, compared to the alternative. . .”  He shrugged.  “It’s not so bad, honestly.  I’ve had a chance to watch my daughter grow up, and to be. . .well, a friend to her, at least.  Some kind of a father.  I can’t honestly say I’d rather be dead.”

“Well, put it like that, I see your point.  I’m sure glad I—got a chance to see you again.  However weird.”

Fraser smiled.  “As am I.”  He rubbed his eyebrow with his thumbnail, his smile fading a little.  “I’m also glad to know that—well, obviously, I didn’t have any way to find out what had happened here after I. . . .In any event, I’m glad to know that you’re all right.”  His eyes met Ray’s just for a second, then he looked away.  “And you’re doing well, apparently?  I should congratulate you on your promotion.  How are you finding the view from Welsh’s side of the desk?”

“Ah, it’s all right.” Ray shrugged.  “I don’t know why the powers that be decided to put me in charge of the candy store, but I think I do okay.  I’d honestly rather be out on the streets, but I don’t really have what it takes any more.  I mean, knees, eyes, reflexes, all that shit’s gone kind of creaky on me and it’s probably just as well I’m not trusting my life or anyone else’s to it on a daily basis.  Besides, after—it was never the same without you.”

“You were a fine detective,” said Fraser.  “With or without me.  And I’m sure you’re doing a fine job with your new responsibilities as well.”

“I don’t mean I couldn’t _do_ the job,” said Ray.  “It’s just, it wasn’t the same job after you were gone.”  He shook his head.  “Never mind, it’s fine, I’m fine.  Just grousing about getting older, you know?  Which is like, a pretty dumb thing to complain about, right this minute.”

“No offense taken.”  Fraser got up off the floor and reclaimed his seat in the armchair. 

“Ray, may I ask. . . ?” he began after a moment of hesitation.

“Anything, shoot.” 

“Diefenbaker?”

“Oh.  Yeah.”  Ray looked down at his hands.  “He, uh, he stayed with me, for a while.  He was a big help, after. . .But he was never really a city wolf, you know?  I mean, he was fine in Chicago with you, he was happy, but it wasn’t Chicago for its own sake.  So, I—when I figured that out, I took him back up to the Northwest Territories and let him go back to the woods.  I mean, I did some research first, scoped out the right habitat and everything.  He, um, he seemed like he thought it was the right kind of place.  Seemed happy to go.” 

He sneaked an anxious peek at Fraser, because he’d never been a hundred percent sure that he'd made the right decision with Dief, although his gut had said it was the thing to do.  But Fraser was smiling at him with this tender look that just about melted him.

“Thank you,” said Fraser, with a little wobble in his voice.  “I always wondered.  I didn’t want. . .I knew you’d look after him.  And I think you did the right thing.  Dief put up with the city for my sake, but you’re right: his heart was always in the wild.  Perhaps it was selfish of me to keep him here in the first place, but I. . .he was my friend, and. . .”

“And you needed a friend.  I know, Frase.  Dief knew it too.”

“Yes.”

“I, um.”  He wasn’t sure he wanted to say it, but if you couldn’t tell the truth to your friend even when he came back from the dead. . .  “I always kind of thought the same thing about you.  I mean, I always wondered. . .I thought you’d stay in Canada, after the quest, but you came back here, even though I know you never liked Chicago.  And I, um, I never wanted to ask you about that, because I was afraid. . .”

“I was happy here,” said Fraser.  “Truly, I was.  I—your friendship, our partnership, was one of the greatest gifts of my life.”

“Yeah?”  He knew that, always had known it, but it made him feel warm all over to hear Fraser say it, anyway.

“Absolutely.  But Ray, I don’t want you to think. . .I did miss Canada, and the natural environment, obviously, but, well. . .I enjoyed a good pizza, too.”  He smiled wistfully, but with a glint of humor in his eyes.  “Just as Diefenbaker did.”

Ray smiled back.  Then he sighed.  There were a million things he’d love to talk to Fraser about—hell, it would be great just to hang out not saying anything—but this was borrowed time, and they were, if not exactly on a case, then close enough.

“Look, Frase. . .Fiona.  You’ve got to tell me what’s the deal with her.”

“Her mother just died, she’s alone in a strange city,” said Fraser.  “She needs someone to—to care for her.  To protect her.”

“You know I’ll do my best, buddy, but I gotta know what I’m protecting her _from_.  Is this guy Cunningham, or whoever killed her mom, really coming after her?”

“I have no idea,” said Fraser.  “I don’t know anything about how she died or who was responsible, apart from the little I gathered from hearing your side of the phone call with the RCMP yesterday.  I don’t know why someone would want to find Fiona, or harm her, but it’s possible.”

Ray nodded.  “What about Victoria?”

“What about her?”  Fraser’s expression had gone neutral.

“Is she dangerous?”

“Ray, she’s dead,” said Fraser in his patiently-stating-the-obvious tone.

“Yeah, and so are you, but I’m talking to you,” Ray shot back.

“And like me, Victoria is constrained to talking.”  There was an edge to Fraser’s voice now.  “Only to Fiona, as far as I know, not that I _would_ know.  What are you afraid that she might do?”

“I have no clue,” said Ray.  “That’s why I’m asking you.  If she can’t do anything, why are you afraid of her?”

“I wouldn’t say _afraid_ —“

“Then why did you want me to keep Fiona away from Frannie?  You’re afraid of _someone_ going after Vecchio, or his family.  Or was that not the message you wanted me to get?”

Fraser sighed.  “I’d rather keep Ray out of this, yes.  And Francesca has a house full of children.  I didn’t want them—“

“To get hurt.  By Fiona? Or—?”

“Fiona wouldn’t hurt anyone,” said Fraser firmly.

“But you’re not willing to bet on it.”

“Fiona wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Okay.”  Ray knew better to than to argue with Fraser when he got stubborn like that.  “But Victoria would?”

“I’m not saying that,” said Fraser.  He looked down at his hands where they lay twisted in his lap.  “Ray, I know you have good instincts, I trust your judgment.  Just, please, look out for Fiona.”

“Fraser.  You have to tell me what’s going on.  I can’t operate blind.”

“I don’t know that anything _is_ going on, apart from Fiona wanting to find out about. . .her parents’ history.”

“Which you’re awfully coy about,” said Ray.

Fraser shrugged, still not meeting Ray’s eyes.  “You were right, earlier.  The only thing I could accomplish by telling Fiona my side of the story is to hurt her and force her to choose sides between her parents.  Victoria raised her; I wasn’t there for her.”

“Okay, I get that,” said Ray.  “But _I’m_ not your kid.  You can tell me.  What really happened, back then, with you and Victoria?”

“I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead,” said Fraser.  Blank face, formal voice.  Defenses up.

“So you admit there’s something bad to say,” Ray pressed, although brute force almost never worked to get through to Fraser when he was like this.  But no one had ever called Ray a fast learner.

“It doesn’t matter now,” replied Fraser.

“Bullshit,” Ray snapped.  “Obviously it matters to Fiona.  Obviously it used to matter a whole damn lot to Victoria, if she came to Chicago and risked losing everything just to get revenge on you.  Or isn’t that how it really went down?  How much of Vecchio’s official report is true?  How much did he shove under the rug for you?”

“Leave Ray out of this.”  The edge of anger was back in Fraser’s voice.  “He has nothing to do with it.”

“Fiona sure thinks he does.  But you don’t want her to talk to him.  Afraid he might tell her something you don’t want her to hear?”

“Fiona is angry,” said Fraser.  “At me, justifiably.  That’s fine, but I don’t want her taking it out on Ray.”

“Taking it out on me is just fine, huh?”

“Ray, I—that’s different.  She doesn’t blame you for anything.  There’s nothing she can blame you for.”

“Yeah, and freaked-out kids are always logical about who they get mad at.”

Fraser winced.  “I’m sorry.  I wouldn’t ask if—“

“Forget it, that ain’t the issue, and you know it.  Do you seriously expect me to believe you want me to keep Fiona away from Vecchio because you’re afraid she might yell at him?”

“No, of course not.”

“Because you’re afraid of what he might tell her?  Because you’re afraid of what she might do to him?”

“Ray, I don’t want to argue about this,” said Fraser.

“Yeah, that’s real obvious, Fraser, and you also don’t want to fucking talk about it, you just want me to do what you want, no questions, without knowing the first thing about what the hell is going on, just like always.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t _know—“_

“Yeah, sure, you don’t know, but you damn well suspect someone’s up to something—“

“I’m asking you take reasonable precautions, that’s—“

“—and you’re awfully worried about Vecchio, but me, hey, no problem, it’s not like someone would take a whack at _me_ to try to get at you—“

“Now you’re just being unreasonable and overdramatic—“

“—it’s not like you ever cared enough to trust me with your secrets, not like _Vecchio_ , he knows all about you, huh, all your dirty little—“

“Ray, this is—don’t—“

“—secrets, you’d still rather die than tell me the truth.  Even though you’re already dead.  _Just fucking tell me, Fraser!”_

“No,” said Fraser, and disappeared.

Snarling, Ray grabbed the box of mementos from the table and flung it to floor, where it spilled its sad collection of random junk.  Loose photos, carvings of bears and caribou, ticket stubs and unmated mittens, all the stuff that he couldn’t use or didn’t want to look at on a daily basis, but had hung onto anyway because it reminded him of Fraser.

“Fucking hell.”


	8. Chapter 8

Sitting cross-legged on Lieutenant Kowalski’s bed, Fiona wasn’t eavesdropping.  It would have been the smart thing to do, her mother would certainly be angry if she knew Fiona had passed up the opportunity, but it just seemed. . .rude.  Mean.  So she wasn’t listening, but when the men’s voices (mostly Lieutenant Kowalski’s) rose angrily, she could hear most of the words through the door.

Then suddenly, they broke off.  There was the sound of something hitting the floor, a curse from Lieutenant Kowalski, and then suddenly he was yanking the bedroom door open.

“Get out here,” he ordered her, his voice level but intense, his eyes savage.  He stormed into the bedroom and made for the closet as she obeyed.  Unsure where to go, she hovered by the kitchen counter.  He reappeared a moment later with a bag that he plopped down on the counter by the telephone. 

“Remember Beth Botrelle?” he spat.  “There’s another moral to that story, the one Fraser never liked.  See, ‘cause it wasn’t just my screw-up that put her away.  Beth almost died because a guy I trusted—guy I respected and admired, my _friend_ , always had my back, I would’ve done anything for him—it turned out he was a dirty cop.  Framed her so he could get ahead.  Used me to do it.  Would’ve killed me to keep me from exposing him.  Which just goes to show: friends screw you over and lie to you and tamper with evidence and it’s a big fucking mistake to assume anybody’s above suspicion.” 

He pulled a tangle of wires out the bag, yanked some of them free, and attached them to his telephone, then connected a small speaker to the other end.

“You wanted Ray Vecchio?  We’re gonna have a chat with him.  Except you’re not gonna say anything, got it?  You just listen.  You do anything to let him know you’re there, I’ll—well, just don’t, okay?”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, consulted the screen, and punched a sequence of numbers into the landline’s receiver.  The ringing from the other end of the line sounded from the little speaker, slightly distorted by static.

“Memory Lanes, what can I do for you?” said a man’s voice.

“Vecchio.  It’s Kowalski.  Get somewhere private, I mean seriously private, you don’t want anyone listening in on this.”

 _Except me,_ thought Fiona.  She glanced over the counter into the kitchen and saw her mother standing by the refrigerator, smiling tightly.

“Why do I have the feeling you’re not calling with good news?” said Mr. Vecchio.  “Hang on a sec, let me just. . .All right, should be fine.  Unless you think someone’s listening in like bugging my joint, listening in.”

“Nah, didn’t mean that.  But let’s not waste any time with small talk.  I got a question for you, and you’re not gonna like it, but I need a straight answer, no dicking around.”

“What the hell is this, Kowalski?”

“I need you to tell me about Fraser and Victoria Metcalf,” said Lieutenant Kowalski.  “The real story.  The whole story.”

“It’s not my story to tell.”  Mr. Vecchio sounded pretty angry.  “You’ve got the files, and whatever Fraser might have told you, that’s between you and him—”

“Fraser didn’t tell me thing one,” snapped Lieutenant Kowalski.  “And I can’t exactly ask him now.  Look, Vecchio, I know how tight you two were, believe me, I know all about that.  And I haven’t asked you about it all these years, ‘cause yeah, none of my business.  But I need to know now.  There’s a kid in danger.  Fraser’s kid.”

“Fraser’s—Jesus!  Are you serious?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Lieutenant Kowalski bit out.  “I can’t give you the details and I’m kind of in a hurry here, so just spit it out, all right?  Metcalf in Chicago, what went down?  I know what it says in the case records, what I need to know is, what ain’t in the files.”

“Is she back?” asked Mr. Vecchio.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out.  Which, by the way, remember how we thought someone might be coming after you?  Well, based on what’s in the files, I’d start worrying about that if I was you, but you know more than I do about just how seriously you should worry.  Which is the whole point here, so c’mon, Vecchio, give me the dirty truth.”

“Dirty. . .”  Mr. Vecchio sighed deeply.  “Yeah, all right, but you can’t tell anyone.  I’m serious.”

“I’m not dumb, Vecchio.”

“Yeah, I know.  All right.  Jesus.  Look, she’s a hundred-percent Grade-A dangerous fucking bitch.  She’s got no problem killing—set up a guy and shot him point-blank in the head, she shot _Diefenbaker_ , for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah, all that’s in the files.”

“She fucked Benny up bad,” said Mr. Vecchio.  “He. . .well, he was in love with her, but I think it was all kind of mixed up with some kind of guilt, or, well, you know Benny, he thought it was his job to save everyone’s soul, you know?  He’d arrested her, back when she robbed that bank however many years back, and they’d had some kind of. . .thing, I don’t know the details, but it must have been a pretty damn big thing, except of course, being Benny, he put her in prison anyway.  But when she showed up in Chicago, he just. . .”  Another long sigh. 

“A big thing,” said Fiona’s mother quietly into the pause.  “He’s got that right.  I was nineteen, I’d never been in love before, and Ben was. . .beautiful.  Beautiful face, and I thought he was just as fine on the inside.  I still believed in justice then.  Still believed that a uniform meant that the man wearing it must be good and trustworthy.  But Ben was dirty, even at twenty-two.”  She shook her head. 

“There were four of them in on the robbery,” she went on.  “Ben’s job was to throw the cops off the scent.  He convinced me to drive the getaway car.  He said we’d run away together, we’d be rich and free and in love. . .Then he stabbed us in the back.  His friends, me.  Arrested us, turned us in.  He got commendations.  I got ten years in prison.”  Her mouth twisted up and for a second Fiona was afraid her mother was going to start crying.  But she just shook her head again.

“He was like a kid in love.”  Mr. Vecchio’s voice from the speaker made Fiona jump.  “They holed up together in his apartment, he disappeared off the map—called in sick to work, if you can believe it.  He was. . .I don’t know, I can’t talk about that.”

“I shouldn’t have come to see him again, but I couldn’t stay away,” Fiona’s mother said.  “I wanted to know why he did it.  If he’d ever loved me.  I had this fantasy that maybe, in spite of everything, we could still be happy together and forget the past.  And for those couple of days it seemed. . .well, I guess I fooled myself into believing what I wanted to believe.  But I was happy.  He was as beautiful as ever, and he could still look into your eyes and make you believe whatever he wanted.” 

“Talk,” said Lieutenant Kowalski.

“Well, so then the shit started hitting the fan,” said Mr. Vecchio bitterly.  “The stolen money started showing up around town.  She’d planted it on him, he’d passed some on to me, suddenly Internal Affairs is after both of us for being in on the robbery.  Then she shoots one of the other bank robbers with Fraser’s gun, pins that on him, too.  Through all of this, Fraser’s trying to _protect_ her.”

“From what?” Lieutenant Kowalski asked, roughly.  “From you?”

“No,” snapped Mr. Vecchio, but when he went on, his voice just sounded tired.  “From her accomplice from the robbery.  Before she shot him, I mean.  She’d convinced Benny this guy was after her—shot Dief to make that look convincing—so he brought her to my place to keep her _safe._   Then she slipped the leash and ran off and capped the guy, and Benny _still_ thought she needed protecting.”  

“Jolly got out not long after I did,” said Fiona’s mother.   “He came after Ben.  For the money, and for revenge.  He showed up when Ben was out.  Ben’s gun was on the table but Jolly got to it first.  The poor dog jumped up to protect me and Jolly shot him. . .but that gave me the time I needed to escape out the window.  Jolly must have thought Ben and I were working together—there I was in Ben’s apartment, after all.  When I told Ben, he said he’d take care of it.  Later, he told me not to worry any more, I was safe from Jolly.  He didn’t tell me more than that and I didn’t ask.  He’d shot him dead, hidden the gun. . .I don’t know if the other cops were in on it or if he just played them well, but when the gun turned up, they said it was evidence that I’d shot Jolly myself and tried to frame Ben for it.”

“Protecting from you?” Lieutenant Kowalski prompted, when Mr. Vecchio didn’t go on.  “You were gonna run her in?”

“If I’d known what was going on. . .”  Mr. Vecchio sighed.  “I don’t know.  You asking me if I would have backstabbed Benny to bring in a killer?  Doesn’t matter, I didn’t get the choice.  Anyway, Benny wasn’t. . .he was crazy for her but he still thought he could talk her into turning herself in.  You know, because it was the right thing to do.  He swung some kind of deal for her, but of course she never showed.  He stuck out his neck for her and she set him up to take the fall for all of it.”

Lieutenant Kowalski spat out some bad words.  Mr. Vecchio said something equally sharp back, but Fiona’s mother was talking again, making it hard to follow what the men were saying.

“I was the one who was supposed to take the fall,” said her mother.  “Ben told me the cops were after me for murdering Jolly.  I’d just gotten out of prison, I didn’t want to go back.  I was scared.  Ben said he’d keep me safe, but it was a lie.  He and his new partner, Detective Vecchio, were going to put me away for murder, pin everything on me and keep the money for themselves.  Maybe it was Ben’s idea originally, but they were both in on it.  He needed Vecchio to make the arrangements, cook the reports, lead the police by the nose.  Vecchio has no reason to admit it, but he was in it just as deep as Ben.”

“No, damnit!” shouted Lieutenant Kowalski.  “That’s the story in the files.  I need to know the rest.  What you kept out of the report.”

“That he fucking loved the bitch, that’s all,” Mr. Vecchio shot back.  “He wanted to _save_ her, even after he knew she was out to ruin him.  And me, I might add.”

“How do you come into this?”

“Oh, just as a way of getting at Fraser.  She brought IA down on me hard.  Called them up and told them there was evidence in my house—but Fraser must have found it first, ‘cause IA found the place trashed, but clean.”

“Woah, woah, evidence of what?” asked Kowalski.

“Key to a locker where the money was, some of it, anyway.  She’d planted it.”

“That the truth?”

“What?  Of course it is.”

“Look, Vecchio, I’m not gonna come after you for what’s dead and buried, but I need to know.  You have anything to do with that money, or the robbery?”

“No.  What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What about Fraser?”

“What kind of stupid-ass question is that?” asked Mr. Vecchio.  “The only thing Fraser had to do with the robbery was arresting Metcalf in the first place, and her trying to frame him for it afterwards.”

“You know that for sure?”

“Give me a break, Kowalski, this is _Fraser_ we’re talking about.  The man who could barely bring himself to lift a pack of Milk Duds when he wanted to get himself arrested.” 

“That’s right, this is Fraser we’re talking about.”  Lieutenant Kowalski’s fist came down on the counter so hard a glass jumped off and smashed on the floor.  “Fraser, who never told _me_ word one about any of this, so I’m asking _you_ , ‘cause you’re the only person who might have some clue what he fucking well _did_ and what was going on in his goddamn _head._ ”

“I’m _telling_ you, dumb-ass.  I don’t know how the original robbery went down, I wasn’t there.  And I don’t know what happened in Benny’s apartment for a couple of days when he and the bitch were locked in there together, except I’ll put down any money you like that mostly it involved getting laid.  And I can’t tell you what was going on in his head, because who ever knew what the hell was going on in Benny’s head?”

“Not me,” Fiona’s mother whispered, her voice trembling.  “Ben said we’d run away together, and I believed him.  And then, when we got to the train station, his cop friends were waiting to grab me.  Not us.  Just me.”

“You were his best friend,” insisted Lieutenant Kowalski, bitterly.  “His partner.”

“Yeah, and he was ready to jump on that train with a psycho bitch and leave me holding the bag for his bail and for passing stolen bills.  So I fucking shot him in the back.  Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Dead silence from Lieutenant Kowalski; silence on the phone.

“Ben grabbed for me, but he wasn’t quite fast enough.”  Her mother looked past all of them, as if she were watching something happening far away, beyond the walls of the room.  “I jumped on the train as it started pulling out of the station.  Ben ran after me.  I don’t know if he was trying to stop me, or join me. . .I’ve always wondered.  But it didn’t matter, because his _friend_ Vecchio shot him in the back.  He. . .fell. . .on the platform. . .and then the train was out of the station and I never saw him again.  Except in my dreams.  He was always running after me, in my dreams.  Sometimes I was tempted to let him catch me, but I couldn’t, because of you.  Knowing what he was, I couldn’t let him get his hands on you.”

Lieutenant Kowalski’s voice was soft and stunned.  “I—shit.  Fraser was gonna skip with Metcalf?  What makes you think so?”

“He told me.  Afterwards,” said Mr. Vecchio.

“They were working together all along, then.”

“Not on your life,” said Mr. Vecchio.  “She had him wrapped around her finger, yeah, to the point where he was willing to throw his life down the toilet and mine with it.  But he didn’t let her take the money.  Not even at the end.  Cash all over the station floor, diamonds all over the platform, cops watching the whole thing.  Only thing he let her get away with was herself.”

“But he planned to run away with her?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.  Be stupid to call the cops along to your getaway.  I think he just. . .couldn’t stand to let her go, in the end.  Couldn’t stand to watch her go down, either, maybe.  And I think I maybe knew that when I saw him running.  I don’t know.  I thought she had a gun.”

Fiona glanced into the kitchen, but her mother had turned her back and was standing with one hand resting against the refrigerator, her dark hair spilling down her back, the curls trembling as though touched by a breeze.

“Ain’t your fault,” said Lieutenant Kowalski roughly.

“Maybe not.  Most days I think I did him a favor.  But. . .I’m not sure he ever really forgave me for it.”

“What about her?  Think she forgave him?”

Mr. Vecchio snorted.  “She came to Chicago to take him down, and she left without the money, and without him in her pocket _or_ behind bars.  That woman ran on two things: greed and hate.  Maybe she found God sometime in the last thirteen years, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Yeah, me neither,” said Lieutenant Kowalski.  “You watch your back, okay?  I can’t imagine she likes you, either.”

“Shit, Kowalski, my family—Frannie—”

“I got them covered, don’t worry.”

“I’m coming up there, I—“

“No!” barked Lieutenant Kowalski.  “Don’t be a fucking idiot.  She wants you, don’t walk in here with a fucking target painted on your back.  Just sit tight.  I’ve got this.”

“Fuck you, Kowalski.”

“Fuck you, too, I mean it.  Do not do it.”

“You’d better fucking know what you’re doing,” said Mr. Vecchio.

“No shit,” muttered Lieutenant Kowalski, banging the receiver down.

Fiona rested her spinning head between her hands.  She wanted to block her ears, but it was far too late for that; there were too many words already bouncing around in her head.

“He still hates me, after all these years,” whispered Fiona’s mother into the silence.  “Stupid, if he thinks I’d stolen Ben’s loyalty from him.  Ben loved no one but himself.  I learned that, in the end.”

Lieutenant Kowalski’s fist banged the counter, making Fiona jump.  He shoved roughly to his feet and started to pace around the living room, radiating barely contained rage.

“Stupid fucking bastard,” he muttered savagely.  “That’s it, _that’s_ what you couldn’t tell me, even _dead?_   That you loved her?  That you, what, let her drag you down?  Gave her a piece of your soul?  She still got her hooks in you, even now?  So deep you’ll stand back and let her blow everything you love to hell and not do a damn thing to stop it?” 

He rounded on Fiona, so fiercely that she flinched, even though he wasn’t close enough to touch her.

“What the hell is she planning?” he spat at her.  “Why are you here, really?  To do her dirty work?”

“He’s lying!” Fiona blurted back.  “He lied in the reports and he’s lying now.  He just wants to make you think everything’s my mother’s fault.  And you believe him because you don’t want to believe that your friends are liars and thieves and killers—“

“Yeah, like you don’t want to believe your mom’s anything but a fucking martyr.  Except you’re smarter than that.”  His eyes narrowed.  “Which is it?  You playing me?  Or is she playing you?”

“ _Vecchio_ ’s playing you,” said Fiona’s mother disdainfully.  “And Ben’s been playing you both for years.  He’s dead and he’s still playing you.”

Fiona didn’t think she’d looked, but Lieutenant Kowalski scowled and said, “She’s here now.  Ain’t she?  How long?  She hear me talking to Vecchio?”

“It’s none of your business,” Fiona retorted, struggling to keep from crying.  “She doesn’t trust you and neither do I.”

“Well, that’s just too damn bad,” he said shortly.  He turned slowly in place, sweeping the room with his gaze, his fists cocked like he was expecting someone to jump out of nowhere and try to hit him.   “Hey, Victoria, are you listening to me?  You’re dead, you got no business messing around here.  Whatever it is you want from Fraser, you can’t get it no more.  All you can do is hurt more people, starting with your own kid.  I don’t know what the hell you were thinking, dragging her all over the continent to get mixed up in your nasty business.”

“Listen to him.”  Fiona’s mother laughed harshly.  “I’m dead, there’s nothing I can do to anyone.  Except tell the truth, and you’re the only person who can hear me.  And yet he’s terrified of me—and of you.  Ray Vecchio shot Ben to keep his secrets from coming out.  This one’s only got a twelve-year-old to threaten him.”

“He wouldn’t—“ said Fiona without thinking.

“What wouldn’t I?” asked Lieutenant Kowalski.

Her mother shook her head.  “Don’t make the same mistake I did.  He’ll treat you nicely as long as it serves his purposes, but if you’re in his way, he’ll cut you down.  You’re not safe with him.”

Sitting on the stool, Fiona was tall enough to be eye-to-eye with Lieutenant Kowalski.  “My mother hasn’t done anything and neither have I,” she told him, pretending she wasn’t shaking inside.  “I told you the truth: I just came here to find out about Fraser.  He’s the one who lied to you.  Don’t blame my mom just because you loved him and he didn’t love you back.”

He looked like he was about to be sick, and Fiona felt the same.  _He deserves it_ , she told herself.

“I ain’t talking to you,” he hissed.  To the air, he said, “I’m warning you, do not start with me.  The hostage game ain’t pretty, but I ain’t letting your girl get herself in trouble just ‘cause you’re a psycho.  I have to lock her up, I’ll do that.”

Fiona scrambled backwards off the stool, nearly falling in her haste.  She tried to run for the door, but his long legs brought him there ahead of her.

“Nope, sorry, can’t let you do that,” he said.  “You’re going to have to—“

Something square and flat and solid flew past Fiona’s head and struck him in the face, drawing blood and then crashing on the floor.  He grabbed her by the shoulder and pushed her to one side.  Startled and off-balance, she clutched at his arm to keep from falling.

“Take your hands off my daughter!”  The shriek seemed to come from everywhere at once.  More objects hurtled at Lieutenant Kowalski’s head—he dodged a coffee mug, which shattered against the wall behind him—a piece of carved wood bounced off his shoulder, barely missing Fiona’s face.  She glanced over her shoulder and saw her mother, teeth bared, hair flying around her, grabbing anything she could reach, whipping the missiles across the room.  The air seemed to clench, heavy and buzzing with electricity.  Her mother raised her hands, clutching at nothing Fiona could see—and the walls started rattling like a train car going over a suspension bridge.

“Get down!” yelled Lieutenant Kowalski, and then Fiona was falling backwards, landing with a teeth-jarring shock on the floor with him on top of her, her ears ringing with the noise of things smashing on the floor all around her and her mother’s shrill screams.

“Stop it!” screamed Fiona.  “Stop stop stop stop!”

The room went silent, except for Lieutenant Kowalski’s harsh breathing and Fiona’s own sobs.

Lieutenant Kowalski pushed himself up to his knees, releasing her.  His face was streaked with blood from a gash over one eye; his hair and clothes were coated with plaster dust.

“Holy shit,” he muttered.  “Are you okay?”

“Get away from me!” she yelled, scrambling to her feet.  His hands came up, palms toward her as if surrendering, but she didn’t stop to look or listen.  All she wanted was to get away.  Blind with tears, she stumbled into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

 

                                    *                                                *                                    *

 

Kneeling in a mess of plaster and broken dishes and smashed photo frames and the scattered debris of his life, Ray watched the bedroom door slam shut.

“Shit!”  He smacked his fists into his thighs. 

He got to his feet with a groan.  His knees ached, he could feel bruises all along his back, and his head hurt.  When he touched his face, his hand came away smeared with blood.

 _I guess ghosts really can touch stuff if they want to,_ he thought, numbly.  He looked around the room.  It didn’t seem like Victoria was still here, but how would he know?  _For that matter, where’s fucking Fraser when you need him?_

He went over and knocked softly on the bedroom door.

“Fiona?  Are you okay in there?”

There was no answer.

“Fiona, look, I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have lost my—lost it like that.  It wasn’t fair to you.  And then this crazy stuff. . .Look, just let me know if you’re okay.”

Through the door, he heard Fiona’s muffled voice saying something that could have been “Go away.”

“You talking to me or to. . .her?”

“She’s not here.”  Fiona’s voice was garbled with tears.  “Leave me alone.”

Which was as good an answer as he was going to get, so although it didn’t really prove anything, Ray said, as gently as he could, “Okay.  You want to talk later, I’ll be here.”

She didn’t answer, but he hadn’t expected her to.

Cursing wearily under his breath, he went to wash the blood off his hands and face so he could start cleaning up the mess.

 

                                    *                                    *                                    *

 

The sound of running water from the bathroom was audible in the bedroom, but there was no one there to hear it.  Through the open window came the sound of traffic and sirens in the distance.

 

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

**Author's Note:**

> It turns out canon!Thatcher pronounces it "lootenant," but I was unable to kill that particular darling. Perhaps she's gone extra-Anglo since leaving Chicago.


End file.
